RECENT ADVANCE IN BASIC SCIENCE
Precision medicine and “-omics” techniques
Salvatore Cucchiara
UOC di Gastroenterologia ed Epatologia Pediatrica, Sapienza Università di Roma
Modern health care is being revolutionized by the transition from symptom-based disease diagnosis and treatment to precision medicine in which treatments are tailored to each single patient on the basis of his/her individual clinical and biological characteristics. This is made possible by the rapid evolution of system biology which uses high-throughput technologies and computational frameworks for the examination of biological systems (genomes, transcriptomes, proteomes, metabolomes, and other omics) in unprecedented detail. This expanding knowledge has led to development of new therapies which are increasingly moving away from the “one-size-fits-all” rationale towards the precision medicine one, based on delivering the most appropriate therapy to a patient on the basis of the clinical and molecular features of their disease. An innovation in clinical-trial strategies is needed to follow the development of therapeutic agents that target molecular mechanisms.