ScienceDaily (Aug. 8, 2007) — An international team of researchers is proposing a plan for building a "toolkit" for personalized medicine -- that long-anticipated era in which physicians customize efforts to prevent, diagnose, and treat diseases to match the unique genetic characteristics of each individual patient.

In a review article scheduled for the August 3 issue of ACS's Journal of Proteome Research, a monthly publication, Fredrik Nyberg, György Marko-Varga, Atsushi Ogiwara and colleagues point out that cancer therapy already is moving toward individualized treatments selected according to tumor cell type and patients' predicted responses to different kinds of anti-cancer drugs.

Their paper describes key features of state-of-the-art proteomic profiling, in which blood tests are used to analyze single proteins and multiple "fingerprint" protein patterns that are present, including proteins that can serve as biomarkers for disease.

The article discusses components of a toolkit that physicians could use in everyday medicine, including rapid methods for identifying proteins in the blood and processing the resulting data. "The potential of our proteomics toolkit hopefully brings us one step closer to a practical personalized medicine," the report states.

Article: "Personalized medicine and Proteomics--Lessons from Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer"

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