To meet the growing demand for preemptive pharmacogenomic risk factor screening that may one day aid drug prescription practices, Thermo Fisher Scientific has introduced PharmacoScan Solution, a new microarray-based research tool that contains pharmacogenomic content with relevant markers involved in absorption, distribution, metabolism and excretion (ADME) pathways of commonly prescribed medicines.

Pharmacogenomics (PGx) research is aimed at increasing drug development outcome efficiency and reducing adverse drug reactions. In the U.S. alone, adverse drug reactions cause the death, hospitalization or serious injury of more than 2 million people each year. PharmacoScan Solution addresses the pharmacogenomic profiling research objectives of pharmaceutical companies running phase I and phase II clinical trials, as well as healthcare organizations, including regional healthcare systems, cancer centers and large hospitals that want to better understand pharmacogenomic risk factors.

Using the PharmacoScan Solution, researchers can interrogate more than 4,600 markers in nearly 1,200 genes involved in pharmacogenomics pathways with a single assay. As personalized medicine initiatives become more prevalent throughout the world, there is a growing need from the research community for comprehensive tools designed to prospectively profile populations. This effort is aimed at learning how individualized pharmacogenomic signatures could one day become part of an electronic health record that may aid drug prescription, lower costs and improve health outcomes.

PharmacoScan Solution has been developed in collaboration with experts in the field and leading PGx consortia, such as the Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium (CPIC), PharmaADME and PharmGKB. Early access customers include: University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM); University of Alberta; and leading genomic service laboratories, including RUCDR Infinite Biologics and Eurofins Genomics/AROS Applied Biotechnology.

PharmacoScan Solution leverages industry-leading array fidelity, enabled by the Axiom Genotyping Solution and automated GeneTitan Multi-Channel Array Plate Processing Instrument. It enables lot to lot reproducibility and data consistency, high throughput and affordable sample processing, a key factor for multi-year pharmacogenomics profiling of prospective cohorts.

“The content on the array includes highly predictive markers in critical genes like CYP2D6, including its copy number variants, which make this new tool ideal for preemptive screening for research,” said Ulrich Broeckel, M.D., founder and chief executive officer of RPRD Diagnostics, and professor of pediatrics, medicine and physiology at Medical College of Wisconsin, who is a key collaborator on the content selection for PharmacoScan Solution. “Cost-efficient, comprehensive analysis with high ease of use and scalability in throughput, which this array offers, is critical to expanding the application of pharmacogenomics.”

“This next-generation pharmacogenomics solution supports our goal of accelerating global precision medicine research initiatives to one day improve the quality of people’s lives,” said Dr. Laurent Bellon, vice president and general manager of Microarray Business at Thermo Fisher Scientific. “PharmacoScan Solution’s broad content in one single assay and scalable throughput complement Thermo Fisher’s existing solutions for pharmacogenomics, including OpenArray real-time PCR and the Ion AmpliSeq next-generation sequencing platforms for PGx.”