It seems like your phone can do just about anything except prescribe you medicine — yet.
UBC’s head of the department of family practice — Dr. Martin Dawes — and his team think your phone could prescribe you drugs in the not-so-distant future. By taking a sample of your saliva, it may be one day possible to differentiate the drugs that will cure you from the ones that will kill you.
Currently, there is no way of predicting a patient’s response to a drug without knowing their genetic make-up.
“There is an average response, but you as an individual might respond more or less,” said Dawes.
Certain variations in DNA increase a person’s likelihood to respond to certain drugs. While one person may respond very well, another patient may suffer from adverse side effects.
Dawes said that the aim was to reduce the bad reactions to medication associated with common drugs. By taking the patient’s DNA, doctors will be able to proactively know which drugs to give — and to whom.
In a clinical trial with 191 participants, Dawes and his team were able to successfully sequence DNA with only saliva samples. Five family practices, a pharmacy in Vancouver and one on Vancouver Island were involved wherein 99 per cent of the patients had their DNA effectively analyzed.
A specialized computer program was used to pair the patients with suitable drugs for their conditions. The study looked at drugs that are commonly used liked the ones used to treat osteoarthritis, gout, depression and raised blood pressure.
While technology involving pharmacogenetics has no doubt improved over the years, there are still major roadblocks ahead. The process of taking DNA from saliva, and then determining which drugs interact with which genes, remains a costly and difficult process.
“Its’s basically like baking a cake. You can use the same recipe and come out with a completely different cake,” said Dawes.
A single gene might cause multiple reactions in different drugs and certain reactions may be caused by a combination of different genes, resulting in complications with difficult solutions.
The “personal” aspect of personalized medicine also faces controversy from people concerned about their privacy and how confidentiality will be maintained. Whether or not this will become a real issue is hard to say at this point, but there is no doubt in the benefits that pharmacogenetics will bring to the healthcare system.
The researchers are currently working on developing algorithms to link genes to drug reactions and it may be very soon that you can decide on what kind of medicine to get for your cold using an app on your phone.