1. ¹Department of Biopharmaceutical Sciences, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA
2. ²Department of Anesthesia, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA
3. ³Department of Genetics, Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, California, USA
4. ⁴Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA
5. ⁵School of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA
6. ⁶Indiana University School of Medicine, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA
7. ⁷School of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
8. ⁸University of Michigan Cancer Center, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
9. ⁹Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, Oakland, California, USA
10. ¹⁰University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA
11. ¹¹St Jude's Children's Research Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee, USA
12. ¹²Department of Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA
13. ¹³School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA
14. ¹⁴Division of Research, Kaiser Permanente, Oakland, California, USA
15. ¹⁵Schoolof Medicine, University of Maryland, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
16. ¹⁶Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
17. ¹⁷University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
18. ¹⁸Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, Rochester, Minnesota, USA

Correspondence: KM Giacomini, (kathy.giacomini@ucsf.edu)

Abstract

The NIH Pharmacogenetics Research Network (PGRN) is a collaborative group of investigators with a wide range of research interests, but all attempting to correlate drug response with genetic variation. Several research groups concentrate on drugs used to treat specific medical disorders (asthma, depression, cardiovascular disease, addiction of nicotine, and cancer), whereas others are focused on specific groups of proteins that interact with drugs (membrane transporters and phase II drug-metabolizing enzymes). The diverse scientific information is stored and annotated in a publicly accessible knowledge base, the Pharmacogenetics and Pharmacogenomics Knowledge base (PharmGKB). This report highlights selected achievements and scientific approaches as well as hypotheses about future directions of each of the groups within the PGRN. Seven major topics are included: informatics (PharmGKB), cardiovascular, pulmonary, addiction, cancer, transport, and metabolism.