Personalised Medicine Flashcards
Define pharmacokinetics
Relationship between drug administration and exposure to drug
Define pharmacodynamics
Relationship between exposure to drug and effect:
• “dose(concentration) -response
relationship”
• duration of exposure
What is the traditional approach to drugs?
Diagnosis of disease leads to the recommended drug
Clinical trials are undertaken of a heterogeneous population of patients
What is the personalised approach to drugs?
Diagnosis of the disease leads to the molecular characterisation of factors that affect the drug in individual patients leading to a recommended drug
Clinical trial data from patients with the actual disease and various molecular characteristics
What are the types of markers and what do they do?
Diagnostic markers
– eg tumour subclasses – eg different lymphoma subtypes
Prognostic markers
– eg predict whether additional chemotherapy likely to be beneficial (“treat versus no-treat decision”)
Predictive markers
– predict response to drug – patient selection
– “pharmacogenomics”
Pharmacodynamic markers
– measure response to drug
What can be used as biomarkers?
DNA – “genomics”
– whole genome: sequencing
– individual gene polymorphisms: eg genome
hybridization, SNPs
mRNA “transcriptomics” (and microRNA ?)
– whole transcriptome: expression arrays
– individual gene: eg PCR
protein expression “proteomics”
– whole proteome: protein arrays, 2 D gels
– Individual proteins: eg proteins eg ELISA,
immunohistochemistry, mass spectroscopy
metabolomics
What are synonymous SNPs?
Both alleles of a gene encode the same polypeptide
What are non-synonymous SNPs?
The alleles encode a different polypeptide
How does Illumina work?
Chain termination – similar concept to Sanger method
Terminating nucleotide is fluorescently labelled
Fluorescence identified which nucleotide added
Termination can be reversed
How does Hercrptin work?
It inhibits Her2 receptors but it only affects Her2 positive tumours
What is cetuximab and how dies it work?
Cetuximab – monoclonal antibody inhibiting EGF-R
Cetuximab recommended for treatment of colorectal cancer
Only for patients with wild-type ras
Patients with mutated (activated) ras don’t respond to cetuximab
What is gefitinib and how does it work?
Gefitinib – inhibitor of EGF-R kinase
EGF-R is mutated in a subset of NSCLC patients
mutation activates the receptor
Gefitinib licensed for NSCLC patients with positive EGF-R mutation status
What is maraviroc and how does it work?
HIV entry into T cells requires CD4 and either CCR5 or CXCR4 co-receptors
Maraviroc inhibits HIV binding to CCR5 co-receptor but not to CXCR4
Not used for patients with HIV strains that bind CXCR4
What issues are associated with personalised medicine?
•Scientific & technical
– Appropriate biomarkers needed for each drug & clinical data to confirm their success
– $1000 genome
• Regulatory
– approval of these data for decision making
• Logistical - how to implement personalized medicine?
– Longer time diagnosis→ prescribe
– more physician (GP, specialist etc) visits?
• Financial issues
– Cost of diagnostics added to cost of drug
– Smaller markets for each drug = increased cost of drug
• Although markets may not be smaller –we don’t know yet
• Eg could we use herceptin for all HER2 positive cancer not just breast cancer ?
– But savings by reducing “wasted therapy” & better outcomes?
• Legal
– privacy issues pertaining to genetic data
What may happen if elimination is slow?
Exposure to the drug may lead to toxicity
