Imagine: a world in which doctors can tell you exactly which prescription drugs will work for you and which ones won’t based on your genetic makeup – none of this guessing, waiting and watching for adverse side effects.

It’s a world that’s gradually taking shape as research progresses in the world of “personalized medicine,” a noted scientist told a crowd of about 180 people Wednesday night in Woodruff Auditorium on the Kansas University campus.

“Personalized medicine is the dream,” said Kathleen Giacomini, professor and chairwoman of the department of biopharmaceutical science at the University of California-San Francisco.

Giacomini was speaking to a group of graduate students and professors representing 41 universities from around the world, as well as pharmaceutical industry representatives. They’re all staying in Lawrence this week for the biennial meeting of the Globalization of Pharmaceutics Education Network, known as GPEN.

The network, now in its 10th year, originated at KU and this year’s conference was organized by graduate students in KU’s department of pharmaceutical chemistry.

Giacomini, the conference’s keynote speaker, stated her goal right off the bat: “to encourage as many of you as possible to take a leadership role in research in personalized medicine in your career.”

The field of personalized medicine began unfolding along with the sequencing of the human genome, but so far has been “highly hyped,” Giacomini said. Some personalized drugs already are on the market, she said, such as a type of anti-cancer drug designed to target tumors that express a certain gene product.

The FDA also has begun labeling some drugs with warnings that they may not work well for people who have a particular genetic variation.

But by and large, she said, drug therapy remains a “black box.”

“We have no idea when we give a drug to a person whether they will respond to a drug or whether they’ll experience a serious adverse drug reaction,” she said.

Giacomini described examples of her own research team’s efforts, which include study of the genetic variations found among the population in “membrane transporters,” proteins that control how drugs are absorbed and distributed within the body. One of the team’s studies concluded that people with a certain type of genetic variation had a reduced response to a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes.

Kwame Nti-Addae, a KU graduate student in pharmaceutical chemistry, said it was valuable for students to hear directly from an expert who’s working in the field.

“It pushes us graduate students to work even harder,” he said.