| Info. | Vol.2 - No.3 (2008.09.20) |
|---|---|
| Title | Cancer Biomarkers in ?쁎mics Age |
| Authors | Young Il Yeom1, Seon-Young Kim1,Hee Gu Lee1 & Eun Young Song1 |
| Institutions | 1Medical Genomics Research Center, Korea Research Institute
of Bioscience and Biotechnology, 111 Gwahangno, Yuseong-gu, Daejeon 305-806, Korea Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to Y.I. Yeom (yeomyi@kribb.re.kr) |
| Abstract | In spite of the remarkable scientific and technological advances in medicine achieved during the last two decades, cancer incidence is still increasing worldwide and the general ratio of deaths to new cancer cases remains as high as 49% overall, necessitating the discovery of more effective cancer therapeutics and diagnostics. Diagnosis of cancer involves areas like disease susceptibility, detection, prognosis, and monitoring. Biomarkers are the key element of modern diagnostics and their value in medicine is ever increasing. They can be used to diagnose disease risk or presence of disease in an individual, or to tailor treatments for the disease in an individual. Biomarkers are also useful for understanding pathological mechanisms as well as for the development of therapeutics. To date, the role of biomarkers in cancer has been mainly focused to disease detection and prognosis. However, with the personalized medicine coming into practice and thanks to the availability of ?쁮mics-based enabling technologies following the completion of Human Genome Project, the spectrum of current biomarker application is being rapidly expanded such that considerable emphasis also goes to the role of biomarkers in therapeutic response prediction and pharmacodynamics of drug activity. The ?쁮mics technologies have been generating huge amount of data for human genomic variations, which can be transformed into cancer susceptibility biomarkers when combined with epidemiological data. The increasing demand for cancer prevention is likely to leverage on the cancer susceptibility biomarkers in the future to eventually accomplish the personalized medicine in the perspectives of cancer prevention. This concept is increasingly becoming an attainable objective as the remarkable innovations in sequencing technology are, sooner or later, very likely to make the age of ?쁯ersonal genome??a reality. We review the current trend of biomarker discovery and application, emphasizing their diverse roles in medical practice and drug development. |
| Keyword | Cancer, Biomarker, Diagnostics, ?쁎mics, Personal medicine |
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