Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a major problem in modern medicine. ADRs are responsible for 3,600-10,000 deaths per year in Canada, and represent the 4th highest cause of death in Western society. Drugs to treat cancer are largely responsible for the serious ADRs because they are highly potent drugs. Pharmacogenomics is the study to identify the role of the genetic characterizations in drug safety and effectiveness. Canadian Pharmacogenomics Network for Drug Safety (CPNDS) is a nation-wide active surveillance network to conduct research that identifies predictive genetic characteristics of ADRs. This study describes an overview of the drugs, ADRs, and clinical information in the current CPNDS database. The CPNDS database has 93,974 reports of medication use, of which 10,475 were ADR reports and 83,499 were matched controls. The five most frequent ADRs were skin rash, peripheral neuropathy, cardiotoxicity (heart toxicity), central nervous system toxicity, and ototoxicity (hearing loss). All the five most common suspected drugs were drugs to treat cancer: methotrexate, vincristine, doxorubicin, cisplatin, and L-asparaginase. CPNDS has successfully determined very important pharmacogenomic results about ADRs, including anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity and cisplatin-induced ototoxicity. In order to apply our findings into clinical practice, CPNDS developed a Clinical Recommendations Group and published 5 clinical practice guidelines of ADRs including anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity and cisplatin-induced ototoxicity. In conclusion, this summarization of CPNDS database showed that we recruited and collected clinical information of the cases with various ADRs and suspected drugs. Cancer related drugs and ADRs are dominant in the database, and CPNDS has played an important role in cancer treatment. The CPNDS database is a valuable resource for pharmacogenomics.