Individual variability in drug efficacy and drug safety is a major challenge in current clinical practice, drug development, and drug regulation.
Pharmacogenomics and personalised drug therapy, both are increasingly influencing cancer treatment, recently. Personalized therapy for cancer is one in which the chemotherapy regimen is chosen based partly on genetic tests of the patient.
In majority cases, presence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the sequence of the genes encoding proteins that are involved in metabolism of anti-cancer drug are attributed to inter individual variability in drug response.