Dr. Weinshilboum has devoted his career to studies of individualized drug therapy—watching this area of research evolve from pharmacogenetics to pharmacogenomics to pharmaco-omics and “Precision Medicine. After B.A. and M.D. degrees from the University of Kansas and residency training at the Massachusetts General Hospital, he received research training at the NIH in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Julius Axelrod. He then accepted a faculty position at the Mayo Medical School and Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota where his research focused on pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics--with an initial emphasis on drug metabolism, and a focus on methylation and sulfation but, as additional techniques became available, his research also applied genome-wide pharmacogenomic techniques and incorporated other “omics” such as metabolomics--especially to study the drug therapy of breast cancer and depression. Throughout, the emphasis has always been on the functional and mechanistic pursuit of “signals” coming from these studies. Dr. Weinshilboum has been the recipient of an Established Investigatorship of the American Heart Association, a Burroughs Wellcome Scholar Award in Clinical Pharmacology Award, the Oscar B. Hunter Award of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, the Harry Gold Award of the American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics and the Edvard Poulsson Award from the Norwegian Pharmacology Society. He has served on Advisory Councils for two US NIH Institutes, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). Throughout the years, the focus has always been the same—what is the biology and what are the mechanisms responsible for individual variation in drug response phenotypes? | Professor of Medicine Professor of Pharmacology Mayo Clinic |