Breakthroughs in Pharmacy

1. Biologics
2. New family of anti-psychotics
3. Pharmacogenomics

...To name a few

Penicillin

Insulin from rat livers!

Breaking the $100k barrier

socalpharm86 said:

Breaking the $100k barrier

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Germ Theory, vaccination, anesthesia

rxlea said:

3. Pharmacogenomics

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I have a test on Friday in my drug action class. One of the lectures covered pharmacogenomics. It does NOT look fun at all.

Other breakthroughs are robots!

I think this is just fantastic. Soon (10 yrs?) before being prescribed a drug, individuals will be screened for rare 'slow metabolizer' alleles that can cause overdose at standard doses.

The future is here!! hhaaaha!

2 million adverse drug responses annually accounting for $136 billion/year in losses
-Dr. Van Ness (UMN)

Can you say "Job Security"?

fung said:

I have a test on Friday in my drug action class. One of the lectures covered pharmacogenomics. It does NOT look fun at all.

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Are you kidding me??? Pharmacogenomics is some of the the coolest stuff I have ever seen in my life. I love it.

Get out of the basement

Monalyce said:

Are you kidding me??? Pharmacogenomics is some of the the coolest stuff I have ever seen in my life. I love it.

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Pharmacogenomics is one of the classes I am especially looking forward to in my first year of Pharmacy School

Genetics is dumb. The more you know, the more you feel overwhelmed. It really makes me wonder how well pharmacogenentics and pharmacogenomics will be integrated into medicine as you really have to understand genetics to accurately utilize the info imo. This rules out most physcians (and pharmacists over 30). Better therapy or not, if they don't get behind it, it might be another few generations before it become common practice. I'm hoping it is adopted though and elected to take a 500 level genetics coarse in addition to my general genetics coarse I had earlier in hopes that it will pay off in the long run.

Speaking of which, I need to get back to my paper. I'm doing a paper for my 500 level genetics coarse over somatic cell recombination (dna rearrangement for the production of antigen receptors in lymphocyte cells)...yay 15 more pages to go

joetrisman said:

Genetics is dumb. The more you know, the more you feel overwhelmed. It really makes me wonder how well pharmacogenentics and pharmacogenomics will be integrated into medicine as you really have to understand genetics to accurately utilize the info imo. This rules out most physcians (and pharmacists over 30). Better therapy or not, if they don't get behind it, it might be another few generations before it become common practice.

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Poppycock!

the goal is to develop simple clinical tests that indicate the presence of the slow or fast metabolizer allele. You don't have to understand the theory; just read the test result.

We already have these for some 'high adverse reaction risk' drugs. All acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients are screened before treatment with 6-mercaptopurine.

But, I agree genetics sometimes seems convoluted.

BioCaficionado said:

Poppycock!

the goal is to develop simple clinical tests that indicate the presence of the slow or fast metabolizer allele. You don't have to understand the theory; just read the test result.

We already have these for some 'high adverse reaction risk' drugs. All acute lymphoblastic leukemia patients are screened before treatment with 6-mercaptopurine.

But, I agree genetics sometimes seems convoluted.

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One would think, but things like x-inactivation, pharmacogenomics (genome wide comparisons), epigenetics, and metagenomes (lymph cells) make it a little more complicated than if x then y in the case of pharmacogenetics. my 0.02

you should probly post this in the pharmacy forumn, They know more about the subject than pre pharmacy students.