A novel medical approach, personalized medicine, seeks to use genetic information to “personalize” and improve diagnosis, prevention and therapy. The personalized management of cardiovascular disease involves a large spectrum of potential applications, from diagnostics of monogenic disorders, to prevention and management strategies based on modifier genes, to pharmacogenomics. Several lines of ...

We wish to thank Drs. Goldstein and Mascitelli (1) for their careful reading of our article (2). In our introduction, we identified prior reports of the association of antihypertensive treatment with cancer and found the results from previous work to be equivocal. We are aware of the findings of PROSPER inwhich new cancer diagnoses were more frequent on pravastatin than on placebo (1.25, 1.04–1...

Individuals vary widely in their response to drug treatment. After receiving doses of a drug that are recommended based on a population average, some patients could have an insufficient response, whereas others may experience adverse effects. Of the many factors causing variability in drug response across individuals, genetic polymorphism of drug-metabolizing enzymes is deemed to be one of the ...

PURPOSE Accurate prediction of an individual patient's drug response is an important prerequisite of personalized medicine. Recent pharmacogenomics research in chemosensitivity prediction has studied the gene-drug correlation based on transcriptional profiling. However, proteomic profiling will more directly solve the current functional and pharmacologic problems. We sought to determine whether...

This project examines methods for predicting the degree to which various drugs inhibit the growth of a range of cancer cell types. Data consist of over 40,000 features for each of 432 cell lines and cell growth inhibition measurements for 24 drugs. The high dimensionality of this data raises challenges that are addressed through Elastic Net parameter tuning. We also investigate Principal Compon...

One of the definitions of the word pragmatic is “practical as opposed to idealistic.” Many of the controversies regarding the issue of the use of race to any degree whatsoever in medical decision-making may be more of a result of tensions between pragmatic and idealistic positions on the issue. The biological determinants of human intraarterial pressure are such that there is no precise cutpoin...

The DREAM challenge is a community effort to assess current capabilities in systems biology. Two recent challenges focus on cancer cell drug sensitivity and drug synergism, and highlight strengths and weaknesses of current approaches.

Anesthesiologists have been aware of the importance of optimal drug combination long ago and performed many investigations about the combined use of anesthetic agents. There are 3 classes of drug interaction: additive, synergistic, and antagonistic. These definitions of drug interaction suggest that a zero interaction model should exist to be used as a reference in classifying the interaction o...

Pharmacogenomics is defined as the study of the association between genetics and drug response. This is a rapidly expanding field with the hope that, within a few years, prospective genotyping will lead to patients being prescribed drugs which are both safer and more effective ('the right drug for the right patient', or personalized medicine). There are many existing examples in the literature ...