Speaker Profile
Ph.D., PharmD, Associate Director, Institute for Precision Medicine, University of Pittsburgh
Biography
Dr. Philip Empey is the Associate Director of the Institute for Precision Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and UPMC and an Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy. He directs the Pharmacogenomics Center of Excellence and leads the PreCISE-Rx and Test2Learn teams to implement pharmacogenomics clinical, research, and educational initiatives. As a clinician-scientist, Dr. Empey conducts NIH-funded clinical and translational research aimed at understanding the mechanisms of the variability in drug response to improve medication-related outcomes in critically ill patients. His research interests include large scale population preemptive testing, pharmacogenomics clinical implementation, collection of medication-related phenotype information, genotype-phenotype discovery, and understanding the role/impact of xenobiotic transporters following neurological injury.
Talk
Implementing Pharmacogenomics At Population-Scale
Evidence supports the use of pharmacogenomics to guide prescribing, but barriers to implementation exist. Dr. Empey will present outcomes following CYP2C19 genotyping to guide antiplatelet medication prescribing after cardiac catheterization at Pitt/UPMC and lessons learned from similar programs nationally. Emerging large population-scale preemptive pharmacogenomics initiatives will also be discussed with a focus on contemporary issues in the field.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2020 Silicon Valley
Pharmacists have long recognized that using unique patient characteristics to guide pharmacotherapy decision-making can improve drug response and mitigate drug-associated risks. Age, weight, and dietary habits were among the first patient-specific characteristics used to individualize pharmacotherapy. As technologies advanced, analytic tools that measure surrogate markers of liver and renal function, together with drug concentrations in biological fluids, were adopted to optimize therapeutic regimens. Cutting-edge genomic technologies are now being integrated into patient care for the selection of targeted therapies and identification of those at increased risk of poor pharmacotherapy outcomes. Precision Pharmacotherapy is combining genetic, environmental, lifestyle, and other unique patient or disease characteristics to guide drug selection and dosage. This session will introduce the concept and give many examples of how precision pharmacotherapy is used in specialties such as pediatrics, psychology, cardiology and oncology to guide prescribing.
