Healthcare managers and various think tanks of drug policies must identify the relevance of pharmacogenomics, especially in the Indian context, while taking measures to address deadly diseases like tuberculosis, according to professor Dr S Rajarajan, the Research head of Microbiology & Biotechnology, Department of Presidency College, Chennai. He called for the institutes of drug management in the country to ponder over discovering a newer and safer anti TB drugs for primary treatment in place of isoniazid, which is currently used for TB.

The professor was speaking to Pharmabiz about the new initiative his department is taking in association with the Bioinformatics Infrastructure Facility Centre (a Division of Department of Biotechnology) of the College. He said the department is in the pursuit of conducting a new research study, based on herbal plants Henna and Pennywort, for discovering a new drug in lieu of isoniazid as primary drug for tuberculosis.

Pharmacogenomics is a discipline on the inheritable difference among the individuals in response to a drug. He said, though the first pharmacogenomic discovery was done on the same drug, it has not been applied in therapeutic practices. So there is an immediate need for the application of pharmacogenomics in the treatment of tuberculosis.

"Though the human population belongs to different races namely European, African, Mongolian etc, doctors prescribe drugs uniformly just going by the body, weight and the age. They do not consider the possible differences in response to a drug. Even within races, there are sub-groups, ethnic communities and religious groups. When the IQ (Intelligent Quotient), skill and many physical features are unique to every person, the response to a drug or chemical substance is likely to be different," averred Dr Raja Rajan.

He said, even though isoniazid has a proven efficacy in killing the tuberculosis bacilli in the lung region, it has so many adverse effects. The patients administrated with isoniazid for months (at least a minimum period of three months) exhibit weakness, disability, histopathological changes in the liver and it causes to develop cancer in the urinary bladder or colorectal region or in the lung. These untold sufferings are due to the treatment which has to be borne by the patient and naturally ignored by the medical fraternity for want of knowledge of pharmacogenomics.

To a query, the doctor said, in the world scenario, the highest number of population infected with tuberculosis resides in India. In spite of single as well as multiple drug administration, 20 lakh Indians are being infected afresh every year by tuberculosis bacilli and out of these five lakh people die every year. Though tuberculosis affects many part of the body, pulmonary tuberculosis is very common tuberculosis among Indians, Dr Rajarajan said.