Project R-14664

Translating personal genomics to clinical practice: towards genotype-driven drug optimization. (Research)

Adverse drug reactions (ADR) are a major burden to the healthcare system, leading to high societal costs as well as causing potentially harmful effects to the individual patient. ADR contribute to approximately 197 000 annual deaths in the EU, amounting to a total societal cost of € 79 billion. In the last few decades, the decreasing cost of sequencing technologies has played an important role in advancing personalized medicine. This led to notable progress in both drug development and prescription. As genome sequencing becomes more affordable, it is also becoming increasingly accessible to the general public. The growing accessibility, in combination with the decreasing costs of personal genome sequencing, paves the way for optimizing drug prescription based on an individual's genome. Pharmacogenomics (PGx), which is the study of how an individual's genome affects their response to therapeutic drugs, has come of age. PGx-guided prescription aims to personalize drug therapy by tailoring the drug (dosage) to the individual's genetic makeup. This PhD project aims to facilitate the implementation of PGx in clinical practice by developing tools to analyze whole-genome sequencing data for pharmacogenomic purposes.

01 October 2023 - 30 September 2027