Section: Application Domains

Pharmacogenetics

Participants : Marc Lavielle, Kevin Bleakley, Célia Barthélémy.

Medicine, even when prescribed following dosage rules, is an important cause of illness and death. In essence, people's reaction to a given drug depends on their physiological state and environmental factors, but also to their individual genetic make-up.

Pharmacogenetics, a subdomain of pharmacology, is the study of the the relationship between genetic variability and the therapeutic outcome. The future goal is “personal medicine” whereby the drug and dose are chosen with respect to the individual's genetic make-up.

Currently, in the population approach followed by Popix , inter-individual variability in the reaction to drugs is modeled using covariates such as weight, age, sex, ethnic origin, etc. Genetic polymorphisms susceptible to modify pharmacokinetic or pharmacodynamic parameters are much more harder to include, especially as there are millions of possible polymorphisms (and thus covariates) per patient. The subsequent model selection problem is thus very complicated. Popix is working to develop methods for simultaneous model selection and parameter estimation in the SAEM framework in such cases.