An Investigation of the Knowledge Overlap between Pharmacogenomics and Disease Genetics

Precision medicine faces many challenges, including the gap of knowledge between disease genetics and pharmacogenomics (PGx). Disease genetics interprets the pathogenicity of genetic variants for diagnostic purposes, while PGx investigates the genetic influences on drug responses. Ideally, the quality of health care would be improved from the point of disease diagnosis to drug prescribing if PGx is integrated with disease genetics in clinical care. However, PGx genes or variants are usually not reported as a secondary finding even if they are included in a clinical genetic test for diagnostic purposes. This happens even though the detection of PGx variants can provide valuable drug prescribing recommendations. One underlying reason is the lack of systematic classification of the knowledge overlap between PGx and disease genetics. Here, we address this issue by analyzing gene and genetic variant annotations from multiple expert-curated knowledge databases, including PharmGKB, CPIC, ClinGen and ClinVar. We further classified genes based on the strength of evidence supporting a gene’s pathogenic role or PGx effect as well as the level of clinical actionability of a gene. Twenty-six genes were found to have pathogenic variation associated with germline diseases as well as strong evidence for a PGx association. These genes were classified into four sub-categories based on the distinct connection between the gene’s pathogenic role and PGx effect. Moreover, we have also found thirteen RYR1 genetic variants that were annotated as pathogenic and at the same time whose PGx effect was supported by a preponderance of evidence and given drug prescribing recommendations. Overall, we identified a nontrivial number of gene and genetic variant overlaps between disease genetics and PGx, which laid out a foundation for combining PGx and disease genetics to improve clinical care from disease diagnoses to drug prescribing and adherence.