The Question Being Posed?

Byerly, W. (2009). Working with the institutional review board. American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy: AJHP: Official Journal Of The American Society Of Health System Pharmacists, 66(2), 176-184. Retrieved from http://library.kaplan.edu/content.php?pid=150035

In the UK, there are more than 1 billion scripts prescribed and dispensed every year (HSCIC, 2013). There are over 12,000 pharmacies in the UK, and approximately 1.6 million people visit a pharmacy every day (HSCIC, 2013). It is therefore natural to assume that between these 1 billion prescriptions, an error or mistake will be made. Current studies suggest that of all the dispensed medicines, there are approximately 0.01-3.32% errors made in community pharmacy and 0.02-2.7% in hospital pharmacy (James et all, 2009).

As a clinician in a hospital, the pharmacist becomes a member of a professional healthcare team. In their clinical practice, pharmacists are directly involved in ensuring optimal medical therapy for patients by devising therapeutic regimens specific to individual patients. They also staff the Drug Information and Poison Centers whose task is to provide information to other healthcare professionals to assist with therapeutic decision making (uq, 2012).

With the huge shift in the U.S. healthcare system, healthcare services are now trending towards value-based outcomes.1 With passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it has become increasingly important to improve quality of care while simultaneously reducing health care costs.2 Pharmaceutical care services are one of the key components that has an essential impact on optimizing therapy outcomes; minimizing cost and enhancing quality of life of chronically ill patients. Community pharmacists are the third largest healthcare provider group in the world after physicians and nurses.3 Despite the fact that many studies have shown that community pharmacists’ provision of direct patient care can lead to improved patient outcomes and reduced health care costs. However, community pharmacists are the only health professionals who are not primarily rewarded for delivering health care and hence are under-utilized as public health professionals.3 Community pharmacists could help to improve health by reducing drug-related adverse events and promoting better medication adherence, which in turn may help in reducing unnecessary provider visits, hospitalizations, and readmissions while strengthening primary care delivery across the health system.

Braun tells me that there are possibly a million SNPs in each person, though only a small fraction are tightly linked with common ailments. These disease-causing SNPs are fueling a biotech bonanza; the hope is that after finding them, the discoverers can design wonder drugs. In the crowded SNP field, Sequenom vies with Iceland-based deCode Genetics, American companies such as Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Orchid

HC1: Personalized medicine is a relatively new practice that involves using a person’s genetics to make medical decisions about which direction to take in terms of disease prevention, treatment, and diagnosis (“Personalized medicine,” 2015). The practice of personalized medicine allows doctors to predict which diseases a certain individual may be susceptible to so that proper treatment less likely to harm the patient can be ensued. This could potentially be an incredible breakthrough in the field of science and medicine (“What is personalized”, n.d.).

The need for new and more effective treatment continues to increase and personalized medicine appears to be the answer to our prayers. With further research personalized medicine could revolutionize pharmaceuticals and to go out on a limb even find a cure for aids and other cancers. But it is too early to have high expectations for a science that has not been deeply explored. It seems that the fantasy of finding a perfect match treatment for each individual has raised support from many institutions including the White House and the FDA. There have been some recent personalized medicine treatments approved by the FDA and this has lead President Obama to bring forward the Precision Medicine Initiative (U.S. Food and Drug Administration), which would give millions in monetary support for research to be conducted on personalized medicine. The issue here is whether

With the huge diversity and changeability of human biology, it is impossible to imagine a reality without some mutations, changes, or issues in the organs and tissues of humans. Thus, it rightly follows that medications and pharmaceuticals have been created in an effort to counteract the various ailments and illnesses that people can experience. However, as time has gone on and these pharmaceuticals have become more and more high-tech, regulated, and trusted, they have also become incredibly commercialized. Worse still, medications have become incredibly expensive and can be unattainable for some people.

Personalized medicine refers to the prescription of specific treatments and therapeutics best suited for an individual, taking into consideration both genetic and environmental factors that influence response to therapy. (Jain 2016)

The population geneticist is a professor in the UC San Francisco School of Pharmacy, Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences and serves as a core member in the Quantitative Biosciences Institute and the Institute for Human Genetics.

First, it is suggested that one reason for personalized medicine is because current medicine isn’t able to accurately predict which patients will benefit from which treatments beforehand. Instead, many patients are given drugs that will harm them rather than hurt them. This is because the genomic and metabolic landscapes, which are different from patient to patient, are ultimately responsible for a patient’s response to a drug. It is this landscape that can ultimately be connected to disease and analyzed. Studying patients’ genomes, proteomes, metabolomes and microbiomes and

The International HapMap Project is a way to research and provide information about specific illnesses that would lead to new findings of preventing, diagnosing, and treating diseases. “The goal of the HapMap Project is to map and understand the patterns of common genetic diversity in the human genome in order to accelerate the search for the genetic cause of human disease” (Thorisson, 2005). They collect DNA and it contains long chains of four chemicals that are adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. Within these chemicals they contain our physical traits, our likelihood of struggling from disease, and the response of our bodies to substances in the environment.

Josko (2014) asserts that the era of personalized medicine is upon us, and that with the completion of the Human Genome Project, and advances in DNA sequencing techniques and

The chemical genetics approach uses small molecules to perturb a biological system. In a “forward” chemical genetics approach, a biological system is exposed to a collection, or “library,” of assorted molecules, to screen for compound(s) that generate a phenotype of interest1. The intracellular targets of these small molecules can be identified and their functionalities can be interrogated to discover the biological mechanisms through which they exert their influence1. Alternatively, a “reverse” genetics approach involves using specific molecules

Liley L.L., Harrington, S., & Snyder J.S. (2011). PHARMACOLOGY for Canadian Health Care Practice 2nd Canadian Edition. Ontario, Ca: MOSBY Elsvier.