PATRAS, GREECE - Clinical pharmacogenomics (PGx) is the low-hanging fruit on the way to realizing personalized medicine in routine clinical care, given the availability of guidelines that provide evidence-based therapeutic recommendations for more than 200 gene-drug pairs. On this basis, clinical decision support (CDS) systems are indispensable components of PGx implementation, as they document the vast amounts of information contained within a patient’s PGx results and turn these into clinically actionable, concise therapeutic recommendations.

While the implementation of PGx-guided therapy has gained momentum in certain specialized early adopter sites, particularly in the United States, the pace of adoption in other regions such as Europe, the Middle East and Asia has been catching up in recent years. Some of the main challenges still hindering the implementation of PGx in clinical practice are the limitations and fragmentation in the current European healthcare landscape in the availability, capability, and interconnectedness of Electronic Health Record Systems (EHRs), which form the prerequisite for the most efficient delivery of PGx CDS, i.e., through the display of automatic alerts during the prescribing process. 

In order to alleviate and overcome these and other obstacles, the Ubiquitous Pharmacogenomics (U-PGx) consortium (www.upgx.eu) was set up in 2016 with three primary aims: (a) to address current barriers to PGx implementation, including the provision of enabling tools; (b) to yield scientific evidence for the improvement of patient outcomes through pre-emptive PGx testing - where an individual is tested for a panel of multiple genes at once instead of having multiple single gene tests conducted over time, which facilitates PGx-guided treatment for a number of gene-drug combinations throughout an individual’s life - by means of a prospective, randomized clinical study in more than 20