Pharmacogenetics of asthma

Abstract

The study of pharmacogenetics has expanded from what were initially casual drug response observations present in families, to a fully-fledged science with direct therapeutic applications, within a timespan of less than 60 years. Within the field of asthma therapeutics, heterogeneity in patient response to therapeutic agents has been reported from various studies, and several genotype associations with specific therapeutic-response phenotypes have been established. There is however much to be accomplished. The future of asthma pharmacogenetics lies in consolidating and validating clinically important pharmacogenes which are relevant to currently available therapy, and to integrate itself into day to day drug management and the drug development process, in order to streamline the discovery of the potential pharmacogenetic relevance of new drugs. This chapter reviews the pharmacogenetics of current asthma therapies, and discusses challenges which need to be addressed in order to enable the optimisation and personalisation of patient management in a genotype-dependent manner.