The Clinical Side: Genetics and details

The Clinical Side: Genetics and details

Educating doctors on new innovations

Nov 1, 2005
By: Neil Berliner
Pharmaceutical Representative

Knowledge of the recent breakthroughs in our understanding of human genetics will be an increasingly valuable resource to provide to your physicians. This exciting bank of information is growing practically from week to week, and it has direct relevance to the medications that are currently available or coming out very soon.

What to learn

We must differentiate between two broad categories as we learn about this explosion of information: human genetics itself and its relevance to disease states, and the coming revolution in genetic testing and medication development. Advances in both of these categories of information have been largely due to the U.S. Human Genome Project. This enormous undertaking, which began in 1990 and was completed in 2003, was established to identify the 25,000 human protein-coding genes and determine the sequences of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA. Another important goal of the project was the federal government's commitment to the transfer of technology to the pharmaceutical industry. By licensing technologies to private companies and awarding grants for innovative research, the project helped jump-start the biotechnology industry. Below are some aspects of genetics that are worth knowing about:

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