Integration of Pharmacogenomics into Modern Medicine: A Chemical Engineering Challenge

Individual genetic differences likely explain a considerable proportion of the variance in patient treatment response to medication. To respond to differential outcomes, the field of pharmacogenomics has been developed as an approach to medicine that uses specific patient genomic variants to produce an individualized health care solution. The aggregate of an individual’s genetic makeup, called a polygenetic risk score (PRS), provides a useful method for subcategorizing disease states to potentially enhance treatment. Future medical solutions based on a genomic-medicine model could use PRS to evaluate a patient in clinic and prescribe the most appropriate treatment. Because patient populations vary in drug response based on a variety of factors (e.g. gender, ethnicity, disease subtype), all of which are influenced by genetic profile, we hypothesize that refining disease categorization based on genetic data could enhance the practicality of personalized medication plans. Implementation of this refinement and the use of pharmacogenomics will however, present a number of novel engineering challenges pertaining to the scaling, distribution and prescription of one or a combination of medications. Thus, this presentation illustrates the usefulness of  PRS in defining disease subtypes in two cohorts of Sarcoidosis patients, discusses differential drug response within them  and addresses the engineering problems underlying the economic inhibitors of the pharmacogenomic model becoming mainstream.