Public Awareness is Essential for Bio-Banking and Development of Personalized Medicine

Copyright: © 2012 Sarojini S, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Our modern healthcare system requires high quality, highlyspecific treatments for common diverse pathologies including cancer, obesity, diabetes, neurodegenerative, cardiovascular, and autoimmune diseases. Development of personalized medicine for these diseases is a major challenge currently faced by scientists and clinicians. Personalized medicine-based approaches target specific treatments and therapies for a particular individual based on that individual’s molecular data or genetic makeup, and represents a fundamentally different approach from the conventional practice of prescribing general drugs for patients who share similar disease symptoms [1]. In order to develop personalized treatments and cures, as well as for evaluation of ‘high risk’ individuals for developing diseases it is essential that researchers collect and analyze data from large numbers of normal and affected individuals. In the face of modern scientific and computational methodologies, perhaps the most important bottleneck in this endeavor lies in the acquisition and curation of tissue samples. The most promising route through this bottleneck is bio-banking. In essence, bio-banking involves the collection, storage, and provision of data and information gathered from individuals and patients for molecular research. The information is generated through -omics analysis of specimens/tissue samples collected from the individual. RNA, DNA, tumors, cells, tissue, blood or other body fluids, as well as residual tissue samples left over after surgeries or biopsies are archived electronically and documented by bio-banks for genomics and proteomics research purposes [2]. In order to develop and implement personalized medicine approaches, genomic data is integrated with one patient’s clinical information. On a broader level, proteomic approaches have resulted in the creation of a far-reaching and extensive database of genomic mutations and corresponding proteomic expression patterns for global use [3]. Omics-research has focused largely on the analysis of multi-factorial diseases, and has opened new windows for healthcare innovations. These have included the development of novel biomarkers for early detection and improved treatment. Although the gap between discovery of biomarkers and their clinical implementation is long and complex, the continuing validation of biomarkers and assessment of their effectiveness in clinical applications is vital [4].