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Review
. 2021 May 26;11(6):475.
doi: 10.3390/jpm11060475.

Implementing Personalized Medicine in COVID-19 in Andalusia: An Opportunity to Transform the Healthcare System

Joaquín Dopazo  1   2   3 , Douglas Maya-Miles  4   5 , Federico García  1   6   7 , Nicola Lorusso  1   8 , Miguel Ángel Calleja  1   9 , María Jesús Pareja  1   10 , José López-Miranda  1   11   12   13 , Jesús Rodríguez-Baño  1   4   14   15 , Javier Padillo  1   4   16   17 , Isaac Túnez  1   11   12   18   19 , Manuel Romero-Gómez  1   4   5   15   20
Affiliations
Review

Implementing Personalized Medicine in COVID-19 in Andalusia: An Opportunity to Transform the Healthcare System

Joaquín Dopazo et al. J Pers Med. .

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented opportunity to exploit the advantages of personalized medicine for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, surveillance and management of a new challenge in public health. COVID-19 infection is highly variable, ranging from asymptomatic infections to severe, life-threatening manifestations. Personalized medicine can play a key role in elucidating individual susceptibility to the infection as well as inter-individual variability in clinical course, prognosis and response to treatment. Integrating personalized medicine into clinical practice can also transform health care by enabling the design of preventive and therapeutic strategies tailored to individual profiles, improving the detection of outbreaks or defining transmission patterns at an increasingly local level. SARS-CoV2 genome sequencing, together with the assessment of specific patient genetic variants, will support clinical decision-makers and ultimately better ways to fight this disease. Additionally, it would facilitate a better stratification and selection of patients for clinical trials, thus increasing the likelihood of obtaining positive results. Lastly, defining a national strategy to implement in clinical practice all available tools of personalized medicine in COVID-19 could be challenging but linked to a positive transformation of the health care system. In this review, we provide an update of the achievements, promises, and challenges of personalized medicine in the fight against COVID-19 from susceptibility to natural history and response to therapy, as well as from surveillance to control measures and vaccination. We also discuss strategies to facilitate the adoption of this new paradigm for medical and public health measures during and after the pandemic in health care systems.

Keywords: Covid-19; SARS CoV2; epidemiology; host genetics; personalized medicine; precision medicine; viral genome.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The funders had no role in the design of the study, the writing of the manuscript or in the decision to publish it.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Circuit for COVID19 genomic surveillance. (A) Two reference Hospitals, San Cecilio and Virgen del Rocio, collect SARS-CoV-2 samples from Eastern and Western Andalusia, respectively. (B) Samples are sent to GENYO or IBIS sequencing facilities. (C) Sequencing data are sent to the Bioinformatics Area for processing and (D) linking to metadata from the COVID registry, (E) previously collected from the Hospitals. (F) Bioinformatics reports relevant epidemiological information to the COVID registry and (G) information on lineages and variants to the Hospitals for supporting clinical decisions. (H) Clinical data on COVID-19 patients recorded in the Hospitals is stored in the BPS. (I) Viral genomes are also stored in BPS linked to the rest of the patient’s clinical data for further secondary use.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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