A patient comes into your office, and after an examination, tests, and the like, you decide the patient needs to take a specific pharmaceutical for a specific condition. Happens all the time, right?

Some of your patients, however, do not respond to this therapy or do not respond as well as they should. Too often, it takes time to discover the reasons and to alter dosage or treatment.

What if you could get the information that a patient, for example, might have difficulty with metabolizing certain compounds, which would make some treatments less effective? What if you knew that certain pharmaceuticals might not work as well for patients with certain genetic conditions? What would make it even better is if there was a web site that would allow you to find that data quickly, efficiently, and accurately.

Speaking at the Personalized Medicine World Conference in Mountain View on Monday, Russ B. Altman, PhD, Professor of Bioengineering, Genetics, and Medicine and Chair of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University said such a tool is already available for physicians.

In his presentation, Altman used the example of such a patient as described above. For now, this patient may be atypical, as he has had his genome sequenced, but when the physician needed specific information, the physician used the website www.pharmGKB.org to search for the drug name and information from studies on the drug. The results are broken down into categories, such as genes, variants, drugs, diseases, pathways, and publications.

The physician discovered the patient had difficulty metabolizing certain enzymes, and using the information on the website about the pharmaceutical, was able to adjust the dosage, leading to a successful outcome.

The goal of the website, Altman said in his presentation, is to maximize efficacy while minimizing toxicity.

But Altman was quick to add that you don’t have to have a patient who has had their genome sequenced to find useful information on the website. Type in ‘type II diabetes,’ for example, into their search engine, and you can find information about studies, genes, diabetic neuropathy, diabetic retinopathy, and more.

The 11-year old web site’s goal is to curate and store the world’s pharmacogenomic knowledge. The information is publicly available at no charge.