“Why a DNA Medication Passport Could Revolutionize Drug Prescriptions”

One size fits all is not the best strategy when prescribing a drug. It would be better to subject patients to a genetic test so that they can receive exactly the right dose. How long before we all arrive at the pharmacy with a DNA passport?

A man visits the doctor. He has high blood pressure and receives a prescription for an antihypertensive drug. At the pharmacy he happens to run into his neighbor across the street with the same problem. She gets the same pills, exactly the same dosage. Yet only the man suffers from side effects such as dizziness, shortness of breath and abdominal pain.

Many of these differences in response to a drug are due to genetic differences between the people taking them. Scientists are therefore now coming up with a so-called DNA medication passport. The idea behind it: if you show that passport at the pharmacy, you are assured of the correct dosage, tailored to your genes. Recent research shows that such a pass can indeed help to significantly reduce the risk of side effects. Time to give everyone one?

Slow or ultra fast

At present, every adult patient still receives the standard dose of a medicine. We have to get rid of this guesswork, say scientists. We are learning more and more about so-called gene-drug interactions, in other words: the ways in which a patient’s DNA can influence their body’s response to a drug.

“We distinguish three types of interactions,” says Jesse Swen, pharmacogeneticist at the Leiden University Medical Center. “First, we look at the processes a drug is subjected to in the body.” This already starts with the absorption of the medicine into the blood from the intestines (in the case of pills). The substance enters the blood faster in one person than in another. This is due to differences in the genes that code for the proteins that control uptake. But we don’t know much about these gene variants yet.

This is the beginning of the article about tailor-made medicines that can be read in our double-thick summer issue KIJK 6-7. This edition will be in stores from June 1.

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Beeld: Getty Images/Science Photo Library RF