The integration of personalized and systems medicine: bioinformatics support for pharmacogenomics and drug discovery

Abstract

Pharmacogenomics may have a deep impact on every drug treatment protocol to bring the right drug to the right patient. While pharmacogenomics can help achieve individualized medicine, the study of systems biology can help us understand the key issues in pharmacogenomics at different levels. These key issues include the associations between structure and function, the correlations between genotype and phenotype, and the interactions among gene, drug, and environment. Utilizing bioinformatics in pharmacogenomics that is conducted in a systemic way can help integrate information from different levels. At the molecular level, the detailed features of a gene and the relationship between genetic structure and function need to be explored. These detailed features include sequence analytic information such as sequence retrieval and structural modeling, sequence variation information, and sequence patterns that can correlate sequence structure to functional motifs. At the cellular level, the interactions and networks among those molecules should be examined. Higher degrees of understanding at the tissue and organism levels can help establish the correlations between genotype and phenotype. The application of bioinformatics methods in pharmacogenomics and systems biology should enable a more profound understanding of diseases at different levels and lead to both individualized and systems medicine. To facilitate up-to-date bio-informatics support, an integrated search engine and updated collections of tools are freely available at http://sysmed.pharmtao.com.