Tonight, learn about pharmacogenomics or how medicine affects people’s bodies differently

We’ve said it before and we stand by it, but Genspace there in Downtown Brooklyn is consistently doing the most interesting, accessible stuff in the borough.
They’ve got a great talk going on tonight about the field of pharmacogenomics, the field which “utilizes a patient’s genetic profile to help predict how to dose medications, adverse side effects and medication efficacy,” according to the Genspace event page.
RSVP
Pharmacogenomics is most effective in psychiatry, a field where doctors prescribe drugs that remain something of a mystery both in how and why they work. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), for instance, technically remain experimental drugs, as the Food and Drug Administration has never approved them for officially treating depression. And their impact on people differs wildly. A 2012 article in Scientific American noted that SSRIs and their cousins SNRIs “do not help everyone and eventually fail in more than a third of users. A pill that seems to be working today might well stop helping tomorrow.”
So, what gives?
Well, an answer to that is what drives Dr. Lisa Brown, previously of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, and now with the private pharmacogenomics firm Assurex Health.
Tonight at Genspace, Brown will “reveal the science behind PGx [pharmacogenomics] and how it is changing patient treatment in psychiatry.”