Biomarker science: on a theme of personalized medicine

Excerpt

Imagine a scenario where drug development and its rational application to patient care begins with a platform of biomarkers derived from phenotypic screening [1]—an approach associated with 50 % more FDA-approved first-in-class drugs than target-based drug screening [2]. Now envision an academic community-industry collaborative relationship where-in systems-based biology, driven by the rapidly evolving technologies of genetics, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics is integrated, employing complex informatic algorithms and biological networks (interactome) with systems pharmacology, an in-depth understanding of the molecular basis of disease and large-scale clinical data sets (pathophenomics) [3]. The end-result? A comprehensive, flexible and translatable systems-based model for rational drug development formulated to restore human biological homeostasis and preemptively identify undesirable adverse effects. The model also provides a direct pathway and iterative means to develop diagnostic tools that both reflect and capture drug properties, the phenotypic expression of disease and non-homeostatic maintaining drug and disease responses (Fig. 1).

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