To deliver on the promise of personalized medicine requires the integration of pharmacogenomics into the discovery and development of medicines. Over the last few years the pharmaceutical industry has been building considerable resources to achieve that. However, this requires new skill sets, capabilities and infrastructures which have not been a traditional part of the industry's efforts. In this article we describe how the integration of genetics and pharmacogenomics data has begun to deliver success and illustrate the challenges that the new science and technologies bring and how these challenges can be addressed in order to deliver on the promise.