Richard Weinshilboum, M.D.

Pharmacogenomics is the study of the role of inheritance in individual variation in drug response and in the occurrence of adverse drug reactions.

This research program studies pharmacogenomics of drugs that are used to treat cancer — especially breast cancer, leukemia and psychiatric disease. These studies utilize genome-wide techniques such as genome-wide association studies (GWAS) performed both with DNA from patients and from cell line model systems.

We have already used these technqiues successfully to identify genes that are risk factors for adverse drug reactions or lack of drug effect. The techniques used include those of pharmacology, biochemistry, molecular biology and genomics. The high throughput genome-wide techniques and model systems used include yeast gene deletion libraries and panels of cell lines from subjects of differing ethnicity are used in our pharmacogenomic studies. In summary, this research uses 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.