March 29, 2022

Personalised prescribing: using pharmacogenomics to improve patient outcomes

The British Pharmacological Society and Royal College of Physicians have written a joint report on the role that pharmacogenetics – how an individual’s genes can affect their response to different drugs – can play in improving healthcare and treatment options for patients.

While already used in a few specific cases in the NHS, this report explores what the potential benefits could be of a much more extensive and integrated use of this technology across the NHS.

Three of the authors will be at the SMC to discuss the report, the current barriers to the wider use of pharmacogenetic testing, and their resulting guidance about how pharmacogenetics should be implemented to provide improved and more personalised medicine.

Speakers included:

Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, David Weatherall Chair of Medicine at the University of Liverpool, and Chair of the report’s working party

Dr Emma Magavern, Clinician at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London and report author

Professor Sir Mark Caulfield, Vice Principal for Health, Professor of Clinical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London and contributor to the report