Scientists from Applied Biosystems presented data demonstrating superior accuracy of TaqMan drug metabolism genotyping assays in identifying variation in genes that code for drug metabolism enzymes
Identifying these variations is important in both drug development and clinical research, as they are associated with certain diseases such as cancer, and have been shown to significantly impact drug efficacy.
The data, presented at the 56th annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, was based on the use of approximately 2400 markers from the TaqMan Drug Metabolism Enzyme panel examining genetic variation across the International HapMap Project and SNP500Cancer populations.
Assays were measured for their reproducibility, signal intensity, and the ability to make robust genotype calls.
Reference data from this study will be publicly available on the National Cancer Institute's SNP500Cancer website as well as the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base, a publicly available internet research tool to help researchers understand how genetic variation relates to individual differences in reactions to drugs.