Pharmacogenomics can show what your body makes of a drug

DOCTORS HAVE long appreciated that the same dose of medicine will not necessarily have the same effect on different patients. Today they are able to predict how patients will respond to hundreds of drugs. One of the ways in which people differ biologically is in how they metabolise drugs, a process largely dependent on enzymes in the liver that can vary a lot from person to person, and which are genetically determined. Differences in enzymes can lead two patients with the same disease, and the same treatment, to end up with a five-fold difference in the amount of working drug molecules in their blood.