Pharma-Oncogenomics in the Era of Personal Genomics: A Quick Guide to Online Resources and Tools

Increasing engagement in pharmacology and pharmacogenetics education using games and online resources: The PharmacoloGenius mobile app

Mobile applications represent useful instruments to convey information and engage the users even during traveling, thanks to the wide diffusion of smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and similar devices. As such, they have high potential as learning tools that can act complementary to traditional teaching approaches. In the field of pharmacology, mobile applications are increasingly being used to improve adherence of patients or to help them report suspect adverse drug reactions. However, they have been scarcely applied to pharmacology education. In this article, we present PharmacoloGenius, a free Android mobile application integrating resources useful for students as well as healthcare professionals or researchers to expand knowledge on pharmacological topics. We gave particular emphasis to pharmacogenetics, as it is a fundamental tool to achieve personalized treatment. The application offers original games such as pharmacological trivia based on textbooks or special "journal club" trivia based on research articles conveying the state of the art on specific topics. Additionally, the app offers a curated list of online resources to study pharmacology and pharmacogenetics (e.g., free online courses, videos, and databases) as well as updated news on conferences, grants, and opportunities for pharmacologists. In conclusion, PharmacoloGenius aims to be a useful instrument for people interested in expanding their knowledge on pharmacology in an engaging way.

Towards Rational Cancer Therapeutics: Optimizing Dosing, Delivery, Scheduling, and Combinations

The current trend to personalize anticancer therapies mostly relies on selecting the best drug or combination of drugs to achieve optimal efficacy in patients. In addition to the comprehensive genetic and molecular knowledge of each tumor before choosing the drugs to be given, there is probably much room left for improvement by further personalizing the very modes by which the drugs are given, once they have been carefully selected. In particular, shifting from standard dosing to tailored dosing should help in maintaining drug exposure levels in the right therapeutic window, thus ensuring that the efficacy/toxicity balance is optimal. This paper covers the current knowledge regarding pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic relationships of anticancer agents, from decades-old cytotoxics to the latest immune checkpoint inhibitors, the most frequent sources for long-neglected interpatient variability impacting on drug exposure levels, and what could be done to achieve real personalized medicine in oncology such as implementing therapeutic drug monitoring with adaptive dosing strategies or using model-driven modalities for personalized dosing and scheduling.