Adavnced Pharmacogenetics and Drug Safty (B732) is devoted to advance our knowledge of the genetic basis for variable drug response. One of the great challenges in drug development and therapy is maximizing therapeutic response while avoiding adverse effects. Advances in genetic knowledge gained through sequencing have been applied to both of these areas and identifying heritable genetic variants that predict response and toxicity is an area of great interest to researchers. The ultimate goal is to identify clinically significant variations to predict the right choice and dose of medications for individuals-- ?personalizing medicine?. This is particularly desirable in the case of anticancer or antiviral agents where the therapeutic index is very narrow and a large proportion of patients do not respond. The study of pharmacogenomics is complicated by the fact that response and toxicity are multigenic traits and are often confounded by nongenetic factors (e.g., age, co-morbidities, drug-drug interactions, environment, diet, etc). Using knowledge of an individual?s DNA sequence as an integral determinant of drug therapy has not yet become standard in clinical practice; however, several genetics-guided recommendations for physicians have been developed and will be highlighted. As pharmacogenomic advances allow for individualized drug therapies based on genotypic information, the cost of and morbidity from drug toxicity is expected to decrease, and drug efficacy is expected to increase. The ethics and economics of pharmacogenomics will also be discussed.