Abstract
Author(s): Ritu Kataria*, Anurag Katkkar and Jagbir Gagoria
The appeal of pharmacogenetics lies in the possibility of personalized medicine. This sort of care has always been the goal of the doctor-patient relationship, with physicians considering a patient's family history and lifestyle when prescribing treatment. Access to information about an individual's genetic makeup would provide yet another source of personalized data and would therefore enable doctors to better define the nature of a disease and find the most effective treatment for a particular patient. With the help of pharmacogenetic studies, physicians will be able to administer treatment regimens that are personalized and adapted to each person's genetic makeup. Accordingly, two people with the same diagnosis might receive different therapies or drug dosages. This might in turn reduce health care costs, because physicians would be able to prescribe more targeted drugs and pharmaceutical companies would be able to develop and market drugs to specific groups of patients.