Pharmacogenetic aspects of current pharmacotherapy

: Pharmacogenetics is a specific area of personalized medicine. Pharmacogenetic testing is in the ideal situation conducted prior to the initiation of pharmacotherapy in order to increase efficacy or to minimize risk of toxicity in predisposed patients. There are only few examples of such prospective pharmacogenetics in real praxis so far. We summarize examples of pharmacogenetic tests used in praxis. The pharmacogenetic testing should be applied whenever there is evidence that such test can bring benefit over the therapy without such guidance. However, for most of the drugs on the market, reliable evidence is missing and it will take a lot of effort to obtain pharmacogenetic data for future wider use of these tests.