Pharmacoinformatics Infrastructure for Genome-based Personalized Medicine

One of the most important areas for the application of genomic science and technology is said to be personalized medicine (which is often called tailor-made medicine in Japan). Personalized medicine is an idealized medical practice aiming to give the right drugs to the right patients at the right times. It has been widely admitted that many projects for finding Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) are the basis for such practice. However, such knowledge alone is by no means sufficient, for good practice must be supported by well trained medical professionals who can easily access a wide range of relevant data and knowledge at their clinical sites. New informatics are also needed in order to utilize these data and knowledge effectively. Such an informational environment, i.e., data and knowledge bases and computational tools, would be called the infrastructure for personalized medicine. The infrastructure would also be useful in pharmaceutical research for finding leads and analyzing detailed mechanisms of drug actions. As the only national institution for pharmaceutical research in Japan, we have started to implement some components of the infrastructure and put their prototypes on the Web. Further research initiatives are being discussed in the Chem-Bio Informatics Society as components of its Grand Challenge Projects.