These newfound abilities are straining the effectiveness of rules and regulations designed for a simpler world. We are in need of new procedural and organizational innovations to understand and manage the scientific, economic, and societal consequences of this newfound power to modify the health of living things, and new enterprises to exploit and understand this knowledge effectively and reasonably. An essential component of any such management strategy will be recognition of the tremendous biological diversity exhibited not only between species but also among individuals of a given species, including humans. The impending completion of the human genome sequence will provide a valuable departure point for studies of the function of individual gene products and of their interrelated pathways. However, it is now appreciated that there is a great deal of allelic variability in the genome within the human population, which has important consequences for human health, disease predisposition, and response to both intended and unintended chemical exposures.
Allelic variability distinguishes the uniqueness of all organisms genomes.
The Departments of Pharmaceutical Sciences and of Pharmacology at the University of Toronto are forming a joint research and education institute which will represent one of the largest university based centres of Pharma Sciences in North America. We intend to demonstrate that a focus on HMCs as an organizing principle can be as important a direction for health research as a given disease like cancer, or a given physiological system like the nervous system. A major theme will be genomic variability as it applies to individual differences in drug responses. This planning exercise has heightened our awareness of the need for infrastructure that promotes access by biologists, pharmacologists, and toxicologists to new genotyping and bioinformatics tools that are becoming available for defining the impact of intra-species genomic diversity on responsiveness to HMCs. At the moment, this technology is expensive and requires significant technical support to implement.