TECHNOLOGY
THE STUDY OF GENES IS VITAL FOR ACCURATE PATIENT CARE
Adverse drug reactions can be fatal . Dan Streetman from Wolters Kluwer explains how medicine for different racial groups can vastly improve patient care .
WRITTEN BY : HELEN ADAMS
Adverse drug reactions were ranked as the fourth leading cause of death in the U . S . by the FDA in 2018 , something which Dan Streetman wants to change .
Streetman has worked at Wolters Kluwer , an information software and services company for nearly 15 years , where he manages a team of clinical pharmacy specialists , who are responsible for building and maintaining data with respect to drug interactions and pharmacogenomics .
“ Counting myself , there ' s a group of ten of us that write and maintain all of our content on the drug interaction and pharmacogenomic side of things ”, says Streetman .
‘ Pharmacogenomics ’ is a term which refers to the science of trying to understand how differences in genes ( or differences in gene expression ) influence drug response . Within the industry , ‘ pharmacogenomics ’ is often shortened to ‘ PGX ’.
“ This is one small aspect of the bigger effort to try to understand why two individuals respond differently to the same dose of the same medication , even though from all outside perspectives , those people may look exactly the same ”, says Streetman . “ They still may experience quite different responses to the same thing , so this is a science that tries to understand some
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