The efficacies of pharmacological treatments, from aspirin to chemotherapeutics, vary from patient to patient. These variations can be the difference between successful clinical outcomes and life-threatening failures. While decades of research have demonstrated that genetic polymorphisms affect the susceptibility to many diseases and disorders, it is only recently that a connection between patient genotype and pharmacological response has been shown. Pharmacogenetics, the study of the effects of patient genetics on medication responses (both therapeutic and adverse) treatment efficacy, arose with the goal of improving patient outcome by selecting treatments based on a patient's genetic background. Largely unstudied as recently as two decades ago, pharmacogenetics is now a rapidly expanding field due to both the realization of the potential benefits of these analyses and the prevalence of high throughput genotyping techniques. Although still in its infancy, the field of pharmacogenetics holds significant promise for improving treatment outcomes across a wide range of diseases.
