2018 Langley Award for Basic Research on Nicotine and Tobacco: Bringing Precision Medicine to Smoking Cessation.

Abstract

Large segments of the world population use combustible cigarettes, and our society pays a high price for smoking, through increased healthcare expenditures, morbidity and mortality. The development of combustible cigarette smoking requires the initiation of smoking and a subsequent chain of behavioral transitions from experimental use, to established regular use, to the conversion to addiction. Each transition is influenced by both environmental and genetic factors, and our increasing knowledge about genetic contributions to smoking behaviors opens new potential interventions. The large-scale implementation of genetic knowledge to accelerate smoking cessation represents an important clinical challenge for precision medicine. IMPLICATIONSClinical medicine of the future is poised to use an individual s genomic data to predict disease risk and guide clinical care. The treatment of cigarette smoking and tobacco use disorder represents a prime area for genomics implementation. We must prepare for the integration of genomic applications into the clinical care of patients who smoke.