How is pharmacogenetics currently being used at GSK?
AR. In order to do this during development, the single most important thing you can have is the DNA from the person who is taking part in the drug trial, as opposed to looking at it and then trying to get the DNA retrospectively. When we enroll people in drug trials, for the most part – and certainly for the last couple of years – we’ve got informed consent and IRB approval for doing pharmacogenetics on nominally all of our drug trials. JE. Is it evolving in the way you thought? How close is it to being an ‘everyday’ experience – what is there left to come? AR. You ask when is it going to have an effect – at GSK it already is! We have several examples of both adverse events and efficacy, which we’ve actually presented publicly to demonstrate it is working – it’s not a question of when. Let me give you an example. We have a drug in development for cancer therapy. Cancer therapies tolerate adverse events better than most drugs because it’s such a serious indication. What we did is look a
