Pharmacogenetics is the study of the role of inheritance in individual variations in drug response and in the occurrence of adverse drug reactions. In the present post-genomic era, pharmacogenetics has evolved into pharmacogenomics.

This laboratory studies the pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics of enzymes that catalyze the metabolism of drugs, other xenobiotics, neurotransmitters and hormones with a focus on drugs used to treat cancer and neuropsychiatric disease. We have already shown that inherited differences in the methyl and sulfate conjugation of drugs are responsible for large individual differences in drug metabolism, drug response and adverse reaction to drugs. The techniques used include those of pharmacology, biochemistry, molecular biology and genomics. Increasingly, high throughput genome-wide techniques and model systems that include yeast gene deletion libraries and panels of cell lines from subjects of differing ethnicity are used in our pharmacogenomic studies. Our molecular genetic experiments have resulted in the cloning of cDNAs and genes for a series of methyltransferase and sulfotransferase enzymes -- as well as the development of molecular tests that make it possible to protect patients with leukemia and transplantation recipients from life-threatening, genetically-mediated adverse drug reactions. This research is designed to use modern high throughput genome-wide techniques to increase our understanding of the role of inheritance in individual variation in response to drugs and in the pathophysiology of human diseases.