Quantity of data obtained by -omics methods significantly exceeds current analyt-
ical ability. Data storage currently represents an irresolvable issue. There is neither
careful and systematic storage nor genuine data integration.
6 Technological and Infrastructural Presumptions
One of the keys of success of personalized medicine is infrastructure. Development
of European infrastructure will facilitate harmonization of protocols, integration,
and interpretation of data derived from multiple population. This poses a challenge
of interdisciplinarity: the concept of personalized medicine, although straightfor-
ward, includes radical changes in the approaches of health care system towards an
individual person. Therefore, there is a need for restructuring the health care
system—detachment of health care professionals from the so-called organ-based
specialities.
In order to understand technological challenges for future personalized medi-
cine, it is indispensable to focus on three areas: (1) defining the requirements of
medicine and the health care system – determine if technology can meet the
expectations of the key groups involved in the implementation of personalized
approach; (2) what the technology has to offer to personalized medicine – due to
significant technological improvements in the field, one can expect major break-
through in the future; (3) how to efficiently integrate information as to ensure
complete systematic “readout” of individual health status in defined environment.
It is necessary to say a few words about the importance of high-throughput
methods to make personalized medicine become a reality, although this issue has
already been specifically covered by several chapters in this book. Development of
high-throughput methods and their application in medicine are the key to the
development of personalized medicine. High-throughput methods and
nanomedicine representing the technological foundation of -omics are generally
expected to bring about more personalized approach to treatment of many diseases,
increase efficacy of pharmaceutical therapy, reduce adverse drug effects. The
-omics methods such as transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics,
glycomics, structural genomics, etc are already based on nanotechnologies. This
particularly applies to the so-called DNA and protein arrays. The term -omics
encompasses global characterization method of all or majority of members belong-
ing to the particular molecular family in a single step or analysis. Transcriptomics
represents systematic analysis of all genes in an organism, while proteomics
denotes systematic analysis of protein expression under specific conditions, which
include separation, identification, and characterization of protein in an organism.
The term proteome, which was coined in 1994 as a linguistic equivalent of the term
genome (Protein complement to a genome), denotes complete protein content that
8 K. Pavelic ́et al.