Grant: Knowledge Translation Supplement

The Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety (CPNDS) is a nation-wide network of clinicians and researchers who aim to detect severe adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and discover new genetic markers to identify patients who have a high risk of developing severe ADRs. We have already successfully identified such markers for hearing loss and heart failure caused by the cancer drugs cisplatin and anthracyclines, as well as for codeine-induced infant death. Our most important goal at CPNDS is to reduce the occurrence of severe ADRs and improve drug safety by using our discovered markers to predict which patients are at risk of a severe ADR before they start drug therapy. With this project, we plan to take the next steps that are needed to achieve our goal and bring the results of our research back to the patients. More and more genetic markers that predict how people respond to drugs are now included in drug labels. Nevertheless, the use of genetic tests for these markers (pharmacogenetic tests) in clinical practice has been minimal, even for those markers with strong scientific evidence. An important factor responsible for this slow clinical uptake of pharmacogenetic testing is the lack of clinical practice guidelines that provide doctors with clear recommendations on when a test should be used and how test results should be interpreted. With this project, we plan to develop such guidelines that will enable doctors and patients to make a better informed choice about their optimal drug therapy with the help of pharmacogenetic tests. We will start by developing clinical practice guidelines for three genetic markers with strong scientific evidence, which will serve as examples for other pharmacogenetic markers in the future. With this work, we will therefore lay important groundwork for an increased clinical use of all pharmacogenetic tests, and make an important contribution to safer drug therapies that are individually adapted for each patient.