Leveraging large-scale biobank EHRs to enhance pharmacogenetics of cardiometabolic disease medications

Marie C. Sadler, Alexander Apostolov, Caterina Cevallos, Chiara Auwerx, Diogo M. Ribeiro, Russ B. Altman and Zoltán Kutalik ()
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Marie C. Sadler: University Center for Primary Care and Public Health
Alexander Apostolov: University of Lausanne
Caterina Cevallos: University of Lausanne
Chiara Auwerx: University Center for Primary Care and Public Health
Diogo M. Ribeiro: University of Lausanne
Russ B. Altman: Stanford University
Zoltán Kutalik: University Center for Primary Care and Public Health

Nature Communications, 2025, vol. 16, issue 1, 1-18

Abstract: Abstract Electronic health records (EHRs) coupled with large-scale biobanks offer great promises to unravel the genetic underpinnings of treatment efficacy. However, medication-induced biomarker trajectories stemming from such records remain poorly studied. Here, we extract clinical and medication prescription data from EHRs and conduct GWAS and rare variant burden tests in the UK Biobank (discovery) and the All of Us program (replication) on ten cardiometabolic drug response outcomes including lipid response to statins, HbA1c response to metformin and blood pressure response to antihypertensives (N = 932-28,880). Our discovery analyses in participants of European ancestry recover previously reported pharmacogenetic signals at genome-wide significance level (APOE, LPA and SLCO1B1) and a novel rare variant association in GIMAP5 with HbA1c response to metformin. Importantly, these associations are treatment-specific and not associated with biomarker progression in medication-naive individuals. We also found polygenic risk scores to predict drug response, though they explained less than 2% of the variance. In summary, we present an EHR-based framework to study the genetics of drug response and systematically investigated the common and rare pharmacogenetic contribution to cardiometabolic drug response phenotypes in 41,732 UK Biobank and 14,277 All of Us participants.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1038/s41467-025-58152-3

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