Pharmacogenomics Informed Medication Management
The Living Laboratory’s vision is to promote wider adoption of precision medicine in NHS Scotland. Its leading project is an innovative genomics enabled clinical decision support system that will assist doctors and pharmacists to safely adjust prescriptions for patients on multiple medications.
The care of patients with multiple medical conditions is one of the biggest challenges faced by NHS Scotland. Use of multiple medicines (polypharmacy) can create complex healthcare issues for some of the most vulnerable in society. This is because medications do not always work in the same way for all patients, and it can be difficult to predict who will benefit from a medication, who will have no response at all, and who will experience negative side effects.
Every patient is different, and so is their response to medications. Some of the differences in drug response are partly attributable to individual genetic differences. Pharmacogenomics is the study of genetic variation affecting an individual’s response to a drug. Understanding patient-specific genetic characteristics could be a potentially efficient and effective way to determine how a patient will respond to a combination of medicines, allowing for personalised more beneficial, safer and cost-effective drug therapy.
This project will deliver a clinical decision support system that will use information from a patient’s genetic characteristics to inform clinicians as to how that individual may respond to a medicine either individually or in conjunction with other medicines. The system will be the first of its kind to be used in healthcare and its success will see both benefits to patients and their treatment outcomes as well as financial savings for the NHS.
Through a collaboration between industry, academia and the NHS, this project will create a roadmap for the accelerated adoption of precision medicine innovation into the NHS. Testing and evaluating this roadmap will create opportunities for companies to utilise similar routes, driving business growth and increasing future investments in Govan and Glasgow.
