Current Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine (Formerly Current Pharmacogenomics) - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2010

Full text available

Full text available

Premature loss of telomere repeats underlies the pathologies of inherited bone marrow failure syndromes. Over the past decade, researchers have mapped genetic lesions responsible for the accelerated loss of telomere repeats. Haploinsufficiencies in the catalytic core components of the telomere maintenance enzyme telomerase, as well as genetic defects in telomerase holoenzyme components responsible for enzyme s Read More

The euphoria of stem cell therapy has diminished, allowing scientists, clinicians and the general public to seriously re-examine how and what types of stem cells would effectively repair damaged tissue, prevent further tissue damage and/or replace lost cells. Importantly, there is a growing recognition that there are substantial person-to-person differences in the outcome of stem cell therapy. Even though the small molecule Read More

As high-throughput genotyping studies are increasingly being complemented with global gene expression/ transcriptomics analyses, tissue sampling and biopsy methods are becoming a prominent bottleneck in personalized medicine. Surprisingly, this topic has seldom been studied in detail. Quantitative molecular biology and high quality tissue sampling methods need to be developed in parallel, in order to understand diseas Read More

Glycomics is an emerging field of research that examines the structure and function of glycans attached to biomolecules. Glycans are chains of sugars that often form complex branched structures on proteins or lipids. Study of glycans represents a previously “untapped” and overlooked field of inquiry in personalized medicine. In the past, technological approaches in personalized medicine heavily relied on high-throughput ge Read More

Cancer is a heterogeneous disease, originating in different tissues and involving a number of distinct molecular pathways. With the growing availability of high-throughput biological data, including but not limited to gene expression microarrays, integrative computational approaches are increasingly being applied to associate malignancies with specific underlying molecular mechanism(s). The goal of these approaches is t Read More

Despite recent advances in diagnosis and treatment of certain cancers such as breast, colon and prostate cancers, pancreatic cancer remains a deadly malignancy with a mortality rate almost equal to its incidence. The survival benefit after all possible medical interventions is still disappointing for the majority of patients with pancreatic cancer. Improving the quality of life and increasing survival remain as the key Read More