Current Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine (Formerly Current Pharmacogenomics) - Volume 9, Issue 3, 2011

Full text available

Full text available

Full text available

It is now almost twenty years since pharmacogenetics was heralded as the technology most likely to revolutionize medicine by providing personalized medicine to patients and health consumers. While much attention has been focused on the scientific limits and policy failures that have prevented the widespread uptake of personalized medicine to date, this feature article examines the socio-cultural and political as Read More

Synthetic biology and personalized medicine have yet to become intimately involved, but such involvement has many incentives. An examination of each of these fields reveals the potential interfaces between these interventionoriented approaches to biological processes. Personalized medicine would gain from synthetic biology powerful therapeutic tools while synthetic biology would gain from personalized medicine a compellin Read More

Acquired resistance to Herceptin is a major clinical problem in the treatment of HER2-overexpressing breast cancer. Understanding the molecular mechanisms leading to resistance will allow identification of novel therapeutic targets and predictors of therapeutic response. To this end, up-regulation of anti-apoptotic proteins has been associated with resistance to the HER2-targeted drug lapatinib, but has not yet been linke Read More

South Africa, like many other developing countries, stands to benefit from novel diagnostics and drugs developed by pharmacogenomics guidance due to high prevalence of disease burden in the region. This includes both communicable (e.g., HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis) and non-communicable (e.g., diabetes and cardiovascular) diseases. For example, although only 0.7% of the world's population lives in South Africa, the country Read More

Cancer is reported to become one of the leading causes of death worldwide. A number of reasons such as lack of drug efficacy, development of drug resistance and toxicity are contributing towards the development of novel therapeutic alternatives such as cancer vaccines. Tremendous improvements in our understanding of tumor immunology and availability of the state of the art proteomic technologies have made the Read More

Bone marrow transplantation is a form of cell therapy that has been in practice for decades for the treatment of hematological disorders and solid tumors. Immunosuppressive therapy has been a mainstay for treatment, but the severity of the adverse effects has made it an undesirable choice. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), which reside in the vascular regions of the bone marrow, have been shown to serve as cellular support Read More