Lecture 17 - Precision medicine pt 2 Flashcards
how to do we classify patients into disease subclasses?
Patients with the same signs and symptoms of cancer often have different outcomes.
The precision medicine approach provides a research strategy to develop biomarkers that can be used to classify patients with the same cancer into finer subgroups
But this can only be achieved through the synthesis of large amounts of data to identify discriminating biomarkers
what are the challenges of developing precision medicine?
Collecting, handling, storing and transporting millions of biospecimens and then analysing these data using multiple different molecular measurement techniques
Collecting electronic medical record data, merging data from different types of medical records and questionnaires, and then storing large amounts of these data
Analysing data from different sources (for example, questionnaires, molecular measurements and electronic medical records) while respecting the strengths and limitations of each type of data
Combining expertise from multiple different disciplines, including clinicians, laboratory researchers, bioinformaticians, biostatisticians and lawyers
Dissemination of these data for researchers to use while ensuring that legal, ethical and privacy concerns of all participants are addressed
what is bio banking?
For precision medicine to have maximum impact, population level experiments need to be designed.
One way to enable such research, and to maximize accessibility to researchers is to collect samples and host them in a biobank.
Many nations have launched biobank projects, including Estonia, Japan, Canada and Finland. Iceland was a pioneer, but the USA and United Kingdom have two of the largest biobanks available to researchers.
what is the global precision medicine initiatives?
The initiative includes 2 important components:
a focus on cancer intended to spur development of new targeted cancer treatments.
a proposal for establishing a national cohort of at least 1 million people to explore genetic and environmental determinants of health and disease - and set the foundation for a new way of doing research through engaged participants and open, responsible data sharing.
what is the uk biobank project
The UK Biobank project is a prospective cohort study with deep genetic and phenotypic data collected on approximately 500,000 individuals from across the United Kingdom, aged between 40 and 69 at recruitment
The database is regularly augmented with additional data and is globally accessible to approved researchers undertaking vital research into the most common and life-threatening diseases.
It is a major contributor to the advancement of modern medicine and treatment and has enabled several scientific discoveries that improve human health.
Global Precision Medicine Initiatives and outlines three primary objectives:
Develop ways to measure risk for a range of diseases based on environmental exposures, genetic factors, and interactions between the two.
Identify the causes of individual differences in response to commonly used drugs (pharmacogenomics).
Discover biological markers that signal increased or decreased risk of developing common diseases
