https://doi.org/10.4081/mem.2002.683
Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics: expectations and ethical issues.
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Authors
The pharmacogenetics has initially been defined as the study of the variability of individual answer to the medicine tied to personal and family genetics. During the last ten years, the term pharmacogenomics has subsequently sharpened such definition delineating with more precision the fields and the aims of this new scientific area. The objective is fascinating and important even more: to develop and to use new personalized pharmacological therapies, more effective and less harmful, using the discoveries on the human genome.
From the development of this new application of the genetics a change will probably depend also the medical routine, with new diagnostic criterions and especially in the possibility to administer some personalized therapies.
Besides the different technical-scientific issues that are solving yet, the genomics applied to the pharmacological research - that concerns for its field of interest the human genome, and therefore the human person and his/her aims - reachs new and optimal therapeutic solutions through the clinical search but also a wide ethical reflection in comparison to a plurality of elements at stake.
On the other hand it is also necessary to consider that they are possible both therapeutic advantages and disadvantages ones for minority of population. Therefore it is fundamental that a wide and articulated reflection and suitable solutions are undertaken before the marketing of the pharmacogenetical tests that could cause discriminations among the patients.
In the article, the Authors underline the ethical issues related to the basic search in pharmacogenetics, to the identification, to the collection and the patents of the personal data, to the applied search in pharmacogenetics, with the development of diagnostic devices and their use in the clinical experimentations, to the procedures for the maintenance of the biological samples and of the data and for the guardianship of the privacy, to the role of the Ethics Committees in the evaluation of the experimental protocols of pharmacogenetics, to the informed consent for the subjects of experimentation.
How to Cite
PAGEPress has chosen to apply the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) to all manuscripts to be published.
An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
- the author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
- a complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.