Doctors, pharmacists and patients have long known that medications that are wonder drugs for one person are ineffective for others. At least some, and perhaps a great deal, of this variability probably lies in our genes. The information gained in the Human Genome Project and its relevance to pharmacology have spawned a new science called pharmacogenomics. The goals of pharmacogenomics include understanding the inherited basis for differences in drug metabolism among individuals and finding methods of choosing the best drug at the best dose for each individual patient.

Patient-directed drug therapy is still in the future. Research is ongoing, but such tailor-made drugs are years away. Disease-specific drug treatment is, however, on the horizon for infectious diseases, since the decoding of bacterial genomic sequences is also a part of the Human Genome Project. For example, the completion of the sequencing of two strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the germ that causes tuberculosis, is of enormous benefit to scientists struggling to find a vaccine effective against this worldwide killer disease. That vaccine is still years away, though, as there are more than 4,000 genes in that bacterium and determining which ones might be good candidates for targeted drug therapy is no easy task.

Another fruitful area of genomic research will be in the treatment of AIDS. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, that causes the disease is capable of undergoing genetic mutations in response to medications, rendering it resistant. Examining the genome of the form of the virus that a particular patient has will enable his for her doctors to choose the proper combination of medications, based on existing mutations. The development of an effective vaccine against HIV has been a priority among AIDS researchers for years, and genomic analysis should only hasten the process.