Center for Addiction and Mental Health
Pharmacogenomics of Neuropsychiatric Disorders
Until now, the prescribing of medications for complex neuropsychiatric disorders has been largely a trial-and-error process. For antidepressant, antipsychotic, and mood stabilizer drugs, it takes weeks or months to determine if the treatment is successful or not. For depression, 50% of patients will not respond to the first medication. We use measurement of specific DNA variations in genes for drug targets and metabolism to provide valuable information for prediction of response and side effects in a given individual patient. This science of pharmacogenomics has been steadily improving in parallel with the technology for rapid accurate sequencing, documentation of DNA variants, and understanding their functional effects.