The Role of Pharmacists in Pharmacogenetics

Julie Johnson, PharmD, Dean of the University of Florida College of Pharmacy, discusses the various roles pharmacists can play in the field of pharmacogenetics. This video was filmed at the 2019 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Julie Johnson, PharmD: The reality is that pharmacists have, and I think have even more opportunities, to play really a huge variety of roles in precision medicine, particularly as it relates to precision approaches to drug therapy. So our focus really has been pharmacogenetics, but there are a lot of other, if you will, precision approaches. And I would argue therapeutic drug monitoring, which we’ve done for decades, is another example, really, of a precision medicine approach, sort of an older one. Within pharmacogenetics, pharmacists have played critical roles in discovery, in sort of the clinical population estimation and understanding what the mechanisms of the genetic variability are, to developing tools to kind of figure out how you might use that clinically, implementing, doing clinical trials, document the outcomes. So those are sort of the evidence-building pieces.