December 13, 2023

Reggie Dao

11th Grade

Fountain Valley High School

Our world has been exposed to certain substances shaped in pills, dust, or any shape or form that is either illegal or prescribed, known as a drug. All of this material is bound to place extreme psychological effects on people, which raises a certain question. What kind of receptors are in someone’s DNA to determine how they’ll react? Doctors in the field of pharmacogenomics are actively seeking ways to treat their patients, and need to know the cerebral effects that come with these drugs. Thanks to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA structure, figuring out how one’s DNA detects drug reactions is made easier in the lab.

As the drug taken breaks down inside an individual’s body, there are numerous ways it can interact with their DNA. Although, it mainly depends on how you take it or where your drug is decomposing inside your body, to reveal different symptoms. In the beginning stage, this is where receptors called “Drug Receptors”, macromolecules specialized in binding drugs, come to bind with your cells. Based on your DNA, your drug receptors can range from enzymes to nucleic acids or any membrane-bound proteins. Your DNA also determines how many drug receptors you’ll have once clung onto the cell, which has a huge effect on your body’s pharmacological action. For example, many drug receptors of the same type produce a strong reaction to the drug. But if there are only a few receptors or different types involved, it results in no response at all. The DNA is also used to figure out “Drug Uptake” a process of drugs flushing into the cytoplasm. Your DNA can affect the number of drug uptakes your body can handle, and it’s a main factor in showing if the drug can work well or malfunctions with problems in the human body. Decreased uptake means the drug can harm the body, while the normal amount of uptake means the drug works as expected. After the drug is taken, it is the DNA's role to remove it. However, if the drug receptors are removed too quickly, the drug will fail to act in time. 

During the breakdown of the drug, certain types of DNA can also affect how fast the drug is being broken down. If someone’s DNA breaks down a drug much quicker than others, their body gets rid of it faster which results in no proper response to the drug. If one’s DNA also breaks it down much more slowly, it means the response is working, but they’ll need less of the drug. Everyone has different types of DNA, leading to multitudes of problems inside our bodies when we take needed drugs, which is why pharmacogenomic professionals are constantly working towards the development to lessen malfunctions. Mutations in genes are another type of DNA, which results in drugs specialized to how mutations affect proteins and will only work for that mutation. The breakdown and consumption of drugs is a complicated process inside our body that depends on the certain type of DNA determining how it will respond. And with the help of pharmacology, it continues to constantly grow and develop to achieve all DNA types to respond appropriately to these drugs. In the future, the field of pharmacology is bound to produce drugs fit for all genes and DNA types.

Instead of going to the laboratory to see responses to drugs, an at-home test is an alternative that is easy to come by that most people resort to. But are these at-home tests accurate? And how do they work? It’s simply a device that requires one’s DNA (saliva, hair, urine, blood), which detects the drug inside your body. It’s a two-step process, where there is a single sample collected from home, and then brought to a laboratory for testing confirmation. This is a method to figure out if one’s DNA has not taken away drug uptake yet, or if the drug has responded to the body. The science behind these at-home tests is still growing, which brings up the benefits and negatives behind these tests. Their convenience is as simple as buying any test from a local store, with dull equipment and no experience handling medical devices. The most common drug test is known as testing with urine, using a strip with the urine laced. Results come in almost immediately, with the color of the strip changing to detect the presence of a drug.

Another example would be a saliva-based test, a cotton swab rolled inside the cheek and placed into a device or strip. The device or strip will react and change color if the drug is present. It’s much easier to test your results with these innovations, but what are the drawbacks? Although they’re easy to use, inexpensive, quick, and convenient at home, the cons affect the accuracy of it all. People can experience “shy bladder syndrome” and aren’t able to urinate, having a drink or eating before the test can affect accuracy, and it would need observations from laboratories to determine the full accuracy. 

Pharmacology is still a developing field that looks for ways to manufacture new pharmaceuticals that fit different sorts of genes and DNA. It will also strive to improve inventions that fulfill the accuracy of drug presences. Thanks to the discovery of the DNA structure, research is still advancing even though the industry is not flawless. Most prescription medications and tests will be enhanced as time goes by, closing the problems we have now when testing for or using these drugs.