Curators' Favorite Papers

The current Curators' Favorite Papers' highlights the higher frequency of genetic variants conferring increased risk for adverse drug reactions (ADRs) for many commonly used drugs in persons of African descent. Differences in drug response, cure rates and survival outcomes between different ethnic populations exist. To assess this, Aminkeng et al. genotyped 1330 individuals of African and European descent over 4,000 SNPs in 350 key drug absorption, distribution, metabolism, elimination and toxicity genes. Publicly available databases including PharmGKB were utilized to prioritize the selection of functional SNPs. The distribution of many variants were significantly different between African and European populations. These results were presented in the context of clinical annotations (toxicity, efficacy, ADR and drug response pathway) that were curated from PharmGKB and published studies. Important differences among the African populations were also observed in the frequency of variants. Results presented in this paper may translate to significant differences in drug efficacy and safety profiles in different populations.