In an effort to improve the outcome for organ transplant patients, New York University's School of Medicine has embarked on a pharmacogenomics study with a small, Florida-based company to exploit pharmacogenomic data. NYU's Mary Lea Johnson Richards Organ Transplantation Center will provide samples from several hundred patients—responders and nonresponders to immunosuppressive drugs—to DNAPrint genomics, to identify the polymorphisms associated with better drug responses.

NYU transplant surgeon, Thomas Diflo, explains, “people respond to immunosuppressives in different ways. African Americans on cyclosporines tend to have a lot of [organ] rejections. What difference is there between whites and African Americans? One absorbs cyclosporines well, the other doesn't.” Currently, says Diflo, transplant patients are treated with combinations of as many as five immunosuppressive drugs, and doctors have no way of determining which patients will respond to which drugs. A genomic tool that would profile a patient's likely response to immunosuppressives before transplant surgery would allow physicians to base a drug regimen on that profile.

The project will take at least a year, and so will not benefit the patients donating the samples. Assuming DNAPrint can identify the genetic backgrounds that lead to positive responses to immunosuppressives, it will seek regulatory approval for the test.

DNAPrint is also determining single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) maps for patient responses to drugs such as angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, statins and anti-cancer drugs. But their first product, the Retinome classifier, is not a means to determine drug response, but a set of genetic markers that can predict human eye color based on a DNA sample for forensic use.