WEBINAR RECORDED ON OCTOBER 20, 2021

Webinar Summary:

Health disparities exist among various ethnicity groups in the United States, with differences observed in disease prevalence, mortality, and medication responses. Together with multiple social-economic factors, genetic variations contribute to the variability across the populations. Pharmacogenomics (PGx) is the study on how genetics explains the individual’s variabilities in responses to medications. Despite the tremendous progress made in PGx research in the past decades, most of the studies have been conducted mainly on population of European descent. Recently, considerable attention has focused on advancing our understanding of how PGx can be used to address health disparities. This is also highlighted by an FDA draft guidance to address the issue of lack of diversity in clinical trials. Increasing ethnic diversity in research and clinical trials is an important step to close the health disparity in personalized medicine. The presentation will review current approaches for PGx testing, different approaches to and infrastructure needs for implementation. We will also discuss the advantages and how to overcome the challenges of conducting high-throughput comprehensive PGx testing in order to accelerate ethnicity-unbiased personalized therapies and reduce health disparities among populations.