CPIC to issue guidance on non-actionable pharmacogenes

The Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC) hopes to provide more guidance in the future about gene-drug pairs which have a weak evidence base and are not clinically actionable, despite being heavily marketed to healthcare providers and the public. Many of these gene-drug pairs have already been curated by CPIC staff and assigned a CPIC level of C or D, indicating low or highly conflicting evidence.The plan was announced at CPIC’s 2019 open meeting in Memphis by Dr. Mary Relling, co-leader of CPIC. It is hoped that this new initiative will improve standardization of pharmacogenomic (PGx) testing, particularly in the face of increased scrutiny from the FDA.Other CPIC projects announced at the meeting include the development of a CPIC database and API, incorporation of the CPIC guidelines into external resources such as ClinVar and ClinGen and a second phase of the PGx term standardization project which will focus on receptors and other pharmacodynamic genes.You can find out more about CPIC’s future plans in this GenomeWeb article.