Research Profiles – Personalized medicine: Getting the basics right

When the subject of personalized medicine arises, the image it conjures is usually one of a clinician selecting a specific treatment to match the genetic profile of a patient.

As touched upon in last month's introduction to personalized medicine, that kind of tailored treatment is already in the clinic with the use of drugs designed for women whose breast cancer is driven by the over-expression of a specific protein or patients with one type of chronic myeloid leukemia.

Many more models of personalized molecular medicine are in the works, building on two decades of developments in revealing the genetic signatures of various diseases. The ever-increasing ability to identify biomarkers – evidence in our blood and tissue, cells, molecules, genes, enzymes and hormones – is making it possible to predict the prospect of getting a disease, prevent it from occurring, diagnose it if it does occur and treat it more precisely.

But for that to happen, much painstaking, basic research must be done.

To help catalyze advances and innovations, CIHR has launched a new strategic initiative in personalized medicine. The goal is to engage investigators in biomedicine, clinical research, epidemiology, population health, health economics, ethics, health services and policy development to exploit opportunities to ease the burden of disease through the application of personalized medicine approaches.

This month we feature three more CIHR-funded investigators who are doing vital research in the field of personalized medicine. In each case, their research indicates the tireless dedication to the basic research required to advance the field. Their work varies from building better computer algorithms to sort through the millions of bytes of data churned out by next generation sequencing, to examining the combined impacts of genes and the environment to gauge susceptibility to tobacco addiction.

• Computing cancer: The current technological revolution in tracing the genetic roots of cancer is comparable to the 1600s' introduction of the microscope to study cells, says Dr. Sohrab Shah. Working with his University of British Columbia colleague Dr. Samuel Aparicio, Dr. Shah is enhancing the computational prediction power of next generation gene sequencing.

• Embracing all the information: Dr. Youssef Idaghdour, a Banting postdoctoral fellow at the University of Montreal, is analyzing vast amounts of data from more than 20,000 people in search of biomarkers for cardiovascular disease.

• The origins of addiction: The University of Toronto's Dr. Rachel Tyndale is studying how the activity – or lack of activity – of a person's nicotine-metabolizing enzymes affects which smoking cessation treatment will work best for them.

For more information:

Fact Sheet – Personalized Medicine

Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network