Expanding the Frontiers of Pharmacy Practice (II)

Kristin Wiisanen, PharmD - Clinical Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Precision Medicine at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy - talks with us about using genomics to guide therapeutic decisions.

Key Lessons:

• Precision medicine and personalized medicine are synonymous terms.
• Pharmacogenomics is a tool to personalize treatment decisions.  However, it is not the only tool.  Other readily available and routinely collected clinical information has been used to personalize therapy for decades (e.g. blood type, serum creatinine, CV risk score).
• While creating a separate pharmacogenomic service can help ease practitioners into using pharmacogenomic tests, learning how to integrate genetic information as a routine part of clinical decision-making is the ultimate goal.
• Pharmacists have a unique role (and responsibility) to know when and how to use the results of pharmacogenomic tests.
• Teaching students, residents, and fellows to use pharmacogenomic information should be done in an integrated manner - considered alongside other clinical data, not in isolation.
• Several excellent resources now exist that can assist pharmacists and other providers use the results of pharmacogenomic tests including the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB) and the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) Guidelines.