Pharmacogenetics of cardiovascular drugs

Pharmacogenetics is a field aimed at understanding the genetic contribution to inter-patient variability in drug efficacy and toxicity. Treatment of cardiovascular disease is, in most cases, guided by evidence from well-controlled clinical trials. Given the solid scientific basis for the treatment of most cardiovascular diseases, it is common for patients with a given disease to be treated in essentially the same manner. Thus, the clinical trials have been very informative about treating large groups of patients with a given disease, but are slightly less informative about the treatment of individual patients. Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics have the potential of taking the information derived from large clinical trials and further refining it to select the drugs with the greatest likelihood for benefit, and least likelihood for harm, in individual patients, based on their genetic make-up. In this paper, the current literature on cardiovascular pharmacogenetics is emphasised, and how the use of pharmacogenetic/pharmacogenomic information may be particularly useful in the future in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases is also highlighted.