Welcome to the UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network
The UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network is dedicated to developing collaborative partnerships between healthcare professionals, academic researchers, industry partners, regulatory bodies and patients to synergise research into stratified medicine across the UK and support its adoption into the clinic.
What is stratified medicine?
Academic and clinical research has revealed that most diseases have multiple subtypes that require different treatment approaches.
Stratified medicine (also described as personalised, precision, or P4, Predictive, Preventive, Personalized and Participatory medicine) uses technical advances in genetic sequencing techniques, along with bespoke diagnostic tests, to prescribe the drug that is most likely to have a positive therapeutic effect for patients, from the start of their treatment, at the optimum dose and in the right combination with other medication.
Prescribing patients their treatment based on their genetic profile, molecular basis of their disease, risk of disease, and response to a particular drug therapy, rather than the signs or symptoms of their disease, improves healthcare outcome. 
Traditionally patients have been prescribed their medication based on the signs and symptoms of their disease. If a treatment A was not successful patients then had to be prescribed an alternative medication B. Technological advances have led to improved diagnosis of disease and allow patients to be stratified into subgroups, then offered a more precise treatment (either treatment B or C), personalised to the subcategory of their disease.
What is pharmacogenetics?
Inherited differences in genes controlling drug metabolic pathways dictate if an individual will response positively, have no response, or may even have an adverse drug reaction, to a particular drug. Pharmacogenomics, combining pharmacology (drug science) with an individual’s genomic profile (how the genes they have inherited function in metabolising drugs) improves drug safety and is very much of the stratified medicine approach.
What is the UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network?
The UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network brings together the multidisciplinary groups of professionals that are needed to deliver stratified medicine to patients in the clinic. Through the Network groups of experts from academia, the healthcare sector, regulatory organisations and patient groups have the opportunity to collaborate to analyse patient samples, and interpret their data to stratify patients into the subcategory of their disease, then identify novel drug target sites and develop the much needed new drugs and diagnostics to make stratified medicine a reality in the clinic.
Website
Our website is a “one stop shop” providing an amazing amount of information on the activities within the field of stratified medicine. Visitors spend an average time of 15 minutes browsing the site and viewing ~7 pages. The website is popular with a high rate of ~ 70% return traffic.
In a recent survey 90% of responders said the website provided the information they wanted to find and 82% had recommended the Network to their colleagues.
The website is attracting worldwide recognition and we welcome the visitors across the globe to interact with the Network.
20% of our site traffic originates from within the USA.
Founder and steering committee
The Network was first launched in 2010 by Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed and is very fortunate to have the support of key representatives from across all disciplines. Together they offer their expertise and influence to support the network’s aim of increasing the development and adoption of stratified medicine.
Activities of the Network
The Network has built an excellent reputation for the quality of the events that it hosts. Annual open meetings offer talks from academic/clinical experts, senior representatives from industry, regulators and patient groups. These meetings attract leading members of the stratified medicine community so offer great networking opportunities. Through focused workshops the Network invites leading policy makers to debate topics of interest and address the challenges of the wider adoption of stratified medicine. Presentations from these events are available on the website.
Event titles:-
- 1st Annual Open Meeting, in partnership with Wellcome, January 2014
- International Festival of Business, July 2014
- Workshop: Drug response for stratified medicine in terms of drug efficacy, variability and safety, October 2014
- 2nd Annual Open Meeting, in partnership with Wellcome, January 2015
- Workshop, held jointly with University of Leed: Biobanks and biorepositories for stratified medicine, April 2015
- Workshop, held jointly with the MRC Centre for Drug Safety Science: Opportunities for drug repositioning, October 2015
- Workshop: Patient participation in stratified medicine, November 2015
- 3rd Annual Open Meeting. March 2015
- Workshop: Re-engineering clinical pathways to incorporate stratified medicine, April 2016
- Workshop, held jointly with MHRA: Regulation of genomic testing, June 2016
- Workshop, held jointly with Academy of Medical Science: Health economics of stratified medicine, October 2016
- Workshop, held jointly with the NIHR CRN: A Roadmap for Delivery of Stratified Medicine Research in the NHS, October 2016
- 4th Annual Open Meeting, March 2017
- Workshop, held jointly with the RCGP: Stratified Medicine in Primary Care, April 2017
- Workshop: Entrepreneurship, Disruptive Innovation and Personalised Medicine, June 2017
- Workshop, held jointly with the NIHR CRN and RCGP: Genomics research in primary and community care, October 2017
- Workshop, held jointly with NHS England and Genomics England: Pharmacogenomics in the NHS, February 2018
- 5th Annual Open Meeting, March 2018
- Workshop, held jointly with MHRA: Regulatory pathway for genetic tests in clinical practice, May 2018
- Global Pharmacogenomics Leadership Summit, June 2018
- Workshop, held jointly with the NIHR CRN: Engaging the NHS in stratified medicine research, October 2018
- 6th Annual Open Meeting, March 2019
- Global Pharmacogenomics Network Planning Meeting, March 2019
- Workshop held jointly with Innovate UK: Clinical Adoption of Precision Medicine Technologies focused on Imaging Biomarkers and AI, March 2019
- Workshop held jointly with Heakth Education England: Pharmacogenomics in the NHS, May 2019
- Workshop, held jointly with Genomics England: Human Knockouts, October 2019
- 7th Annual Open Meeting, March 2020
Recordings of these events are available here. The findings of the workshops are sent for publication in leading scientific journals.
What we offer
Free membership; simply fill in the online form.
Opportunities to highlight your research activities and develop multidisciplinary research partnerships.
Bringing together representatives from all disciplines to discuss and support the adoption of stratified medicine.
Find out all you ever wanted to know about stratified medicine by browsing the website.
Are you interested in joining the UK Pharmacogenetics & Stratified Medicine Network?