The area has "a lot of sizzle," says John Mellors, a professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and director of its HIV-AIDS program. "[Pharmacogenetics] is a buzzword, but it's an inordinately complex biological problem." Behind the hype of the new study area lies hope, and plenty of money for researchers. The growth in pharmacogenetics departments at biotech and pharmaceutical firms and in public financing through the National Institutes of Health Pharmacogenetics Research Network means new jobs and new opportunities to influence the course of biomedicine.
Nevertheless, the complexity of drug development relates to the difficult study of responses to treatment, which involves differences in effectiveness, resistance, side effects, and drug metabolism. Single genes do not determine most of the effects of medications and not all responses have inherited roots. What's more, amassing databases of human genetic profiles creates enormous ethical and privacy problems. The genetic revolution in pharmaceuticals ...
