Gene Chip for Personalized Meds

Reported August 2006

AUGUSTA, Ga. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- It can be a game of Russian roulette. When doctors try out different meds on patients, they don't always know how they'll respond -- and the wrong guess can have deadly consequences. Now, there's a new way to tell how people break down certain drugs, paving the way for personalized medicine.

Playing tug of war with her horse, Shilo, is the same kind of struggle 62-year-old Lynne Tollison has always had with doctors. She says, "This is the classic answer: 'She obviously takes a lot of medication, and her body builds up tolerances,' like I'm a drug addict."

Pain medications haven't worked for Tollison's arthritis, and side effects prevented her from taking a drug for bipolar disorder. "You get to the point where you don't go to a doctor or dentist when you need to go, because what they give you is not going to help, so you don't go!"

But now, a first-of-its kind gene chip test is solving years of medical mystery. It tells doctors how a person processes about 25 percent of drugs on the market, including most antipsychotic meds.

Psychiatrist Adriana Foster, M.D., of the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, says, "Our slogan is start low and go slow, but patients can't always afford that because they could be terribly depressed and at risk of suicide."

Here's how the test works. First, blood is drawn and DNA is extracted. Then scientists isolate the two genes that break down drugs and look for mutations.

Doctors hope the test will pave the way for a new generation of medicine.

"We have been, you know, waiting for these kind of things for a long time, and now it's here," Zixuan Wang, Ph.D., a microbiologist at Medical College of Georgia, tells Ivanhoe.

For Tollison, who just found out she is a poor metabolizer, it means validation and hopefully finding effective treatments that will allow her to take care of her family. "I have to struggle to keep myself together sometimes, so that would be wonderful," she says.

If a person is a poor metabolizer, they may be susceptible to side effects and will stop taking a much-needed drug because of them. If a person is a fast metabolizer, the drug may not work, and a depressed patient could commit suicide in that time. Right now the gene chip test costs between $600 and $1,000, but in the future it could be something insurance would cover. And the researchers say it could ultimately be cost-effective as there would be fewer trial-and-error prescriptions made.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Adriana Foster, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Psychiatry and Health Behavior
Medical College of Georgia
(706) 721-7488
afoster@mcg.edu

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