Photo: Top, left to right: Emili Leary, Deanna Jacobs and Luca Pereira; Bottom, left to right: Laura Seitz, Kelsey Tingle and Alyssa Rubey.
Five pharmacy students recently completed the two-week pharmacogenomics certificate program coordinated by the Center for Precision Medicine Research at Marshfield Clinic Research Institute. The program is supported by the Clinical and Translational Science Award program through the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (grant UL1TR002373).
Pharmacogenomics is a new area of medicine that takes a patient's genetic variants into account before a physician prescribes or a pharmacist dispenses a medication.
The third-year pharmacy students from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that completed the program included:
- Kelsie E. Tingle
- Laura L. Seitz
- Lucas Pereira
- Deanna M. Jacobs
- Alyssa K. Rubey
The program taught the students about pharmacogenomics, how precision medicine fits into pharmacy and how to interpret pharmacogenomics results.
“We need to teach more pharmacists how to take this personalized information about genetics and use it to make better drug recommendations," said Emili Leary, research project pharmacist at the Center.
Pharmacists are uniquely positioned to help providers and patients choose medications that will work best for their specific DNA.
“Some individuals with specific genetic variants may not respond completely to a certain drug therapy, and other people with certain genetic variants may have an adverse drug reaction based on their own genetics," Leary said.
Marshfield Clinic Health System already returns pharmacogenomics results for some patients, but other programs like the All of Us Research Program will continue to make additional genetic information available.