ABSTRACT
M any people in the world still lack access to essential medicines. The World Health Organization (WHO) has attempted to address this inequity by creating the essential medicines list (See https://www.who.int/medicines/publications/essentialmedicines/ en/). This list is intended to help countries with limited resources focus health expenditures on medicines likely to produce the most health benefits. However, as pointed out in a recent report by Marsh et al,1 if we consider that most of these drugs have been developed and tested in predominantly male Caucasians in industrialized countries, then how can we be sure we are indeed maximizing health benefits globally? We know that there is individual variability in drug response and that human genetic variation is pardy responsible for how humans respond to therapeutics. There is also a growing body of evidence demonstrating ethnic variability in drug response. Recent trends in genetic research and the quest for improving drug therapy indicate that, at least in industrialized countries, the adoption of pharmacogenomics is inevitable due to regulatory incentives, increases in biomarker validation, pharmacoeconomic evidence and patient demand.2
