NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – A new program funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will seek to promote education among pharmacists, students, and other healthcare workers about new advances in personalized medicine, according to the University of California, San Diego, which is a lead partner in the program.
The CDC has funded the Pharmacogenomics Education Program, which aims to provide education to over 100,000 pharmacists and others throughout the country, with around $1 million.
Along with UCSD’s Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, the PharmGenEd collaboration will involve the American Pharmacists Association, the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, and the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, and will include partners at Purdue University and at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden.
The collaboration, which is funded for three years, will work with the CDC to develop a curriculum that is focused on “basic pharmacogenomics concepts, as well as their clinical applications,” which will include live and web-based approaches.
“Pharmacogenomics has a promising potential to increase the response rate of drug therapy and decrease the events of adverse drug reactions,” UCSD principal investigator Grace Kuo said in a statement.
“Currently, however, pharmacogenomics education materials are not readily available to healthcare professionals, and there appears to be a gap between healthcare providers’ knowledge and the expectations of patients regarding pharmacogenomics testing,” the school said.
The collaborators also will attempt to describe genetic sequence differences to pharmacists and healthcare practitioners and how those differences could affect therapeutic outcomes.