K.K. Jain, Textbook of Personalized Medicine, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-2553-7_8, 179
© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Chapter 8
Non-genomic Factors in the Development
of Personalized Medicine
Introduction
Besides genomics other omics, epigenomic and non-genomic factors and
biotechnologies have contributed to the development of personalized medicine.
Although personalized medicine is considered to be mostly based on pharma-
cogenomics, a number of other factors that vary among individuals and should be
considered are:
- Identifi cation of subpopulation of patients best suited for an existing drug
- New drug design for a specifi c sub-population of patients
- Use of an individual patient’s cells or tissues for biological therapies
- Cytomics: analysis of disease at single cell level.
- Pharmacoepigenomics
- In case of cancer, sub-classifi cation of type of cancer best suited for a drug
- Drug dose adjusted to metabolic status of an individual
- Drug administration at the right stage in the course of the disease for optimal
benefi t. - Drug administration at the right time of the day taking into consideration the
relation of the disease manifestations according to diurnal rhythms, e.g. blood
pressure values in hypertensive patients fl uctuate according to time of the day. - Follow-up of therapy with a biomarker or diagnostic assays
Some of the factors have been discussed in other chapters. Other factors are dis-
cussed briefl y in this section. Proteomics and metabolomics are topics of separate
chapters. Some of the other non-genomic factors will be considered in this chapter.
Among biotechnologies, nanobiotechnology has made important contributions to
the development of personalized medicine.