Clinical & Pharmacology & Therapeutics – Pharmacogenomics is an important element of precision medicine. Advances in pharmacogenomics implementation have been made but significant barriers remain, including evidence, reimbursement, and clinician knowledge, among others. Widespread adoption of pharmacogenomics requires overcoming these barriers, a clinician champion group, which we propose will be pharmacists, and an easily accessible setting, which may be the community pharmacy.

American Family Physician – Clinical pharmacogenetics, the use of genetic data to guide drug therapy decisions, is beginning to be used for medications commonly prescribed by family physicians. However, clinicians are largely unfamiliar with principles supporting clinical use of this type of data.

Current Hypertension Report – Heart disease is a leading cause of death in the United States, and hypertension is a predominant risk factor. Thus, effective blood pressure control is important to prevent adverse sequelae of hypertension, including heart failure, coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation, and ischemic stroke. Over half of Americans have uncontrolled blood pressure, which may in part be explained by interpatient variability in drug response secondary to genetic polymorphism.

Current Hypertension Report – Resistant hypertension (RHTN), defined as an uncontrolled blood pressure despite the use of multiple antihypertensive medications, is an increasing clinical problem associated with increased cardiovascular (CV) risk, including stroke and target organ damage.

Pharmacogenomics Journal – Clinician attitudes towards multiplexed genomic testing may be vital to the success of translational programs. We surveyed clinicians at an academic medical center about their views on a large pharmacogenomics implementation, the PREDICT (Pharmacogenomic Resource for Enhanced Decisions in Care & Treatment) program.

Future Cardiology – Following completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, Dr Francis Collins and others on behalf of the National Human Genome Research Institute announced their vision for the future of genomics research. A number of grand challenges were identified, and among these were developing strategies to identify genetic contributions to drug response, creating genome-based approaches to predict drug response, and applying discoveries to promote the use of genomic information into clinical practice. The NIH has invested significant resources in addressing these challenges, including funding the International HapMap and 1000 Genomes Projects, which have enabled genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of drug response.