At-home DNA tests predict how you'll respond to drugs — but how well do they work?
Pharmacogenomic, or PGx, tests predict how your genes might affect your response to medications. But they have their limitations.
Philip Empey
Associate Professor, Pharmacy and Therapeutics; Director, Pharmacogenomics Center of Excellence, University of Pittsburgh
Dr. Philip Empey is the Associate Director for Pharmacogenomics of the Pitt/UPMC Institute for Precision Medicine and leads the PreCISE-Rx and Test2Learn teams to implement pharmacogenomics clinical, research, and educational initiatives. He also directs the University of Pittsburgh - Thermo Fisher Scientific Pharamcogenomics Center of Excellence which is deploying population scale preemptive pharmagenomics testing (to >150,000 patients) in western Pennsylvania. As a clinician-scientist in the Department of Pharmacy and Therapeutics, Dr. Empey conducts NIH-funded clinical and translational research aimed at understanding the mechanisms of the variability in drug response to improve medication-related outcomes in critically-ill patients. He received his PharmD from the University of Rhode Island and completed PGY1 and PGY2 residencies in Pharmacy Practice and Critical Care at the University of Kentucky. He earned a PhD in Clinical Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Kentucky before completing postdoctoral research training at the University of Pittsburgh.
