%0 Journal Article
%T Tissue Banking, Bioinformatics, and Electronic Medical Records: The Front-End Requirements for Personalized Medicine
%A K. Stephen Suh
%A Sreeja Sarojini
%A Maher Youssif
%A Kip Nalley
%A Natasha Milinovikj
%A Fathi Elloumi
%A Steven Russell
%A Andrew Pecora
%A Elyssa Schecter
%A Andre Goy
%J Journal of Oncology
%D 2013
%I Hindawi Publishing Corporation
%R 10.1155/2013/368751
%X Personalized medicine promises patient-tailored treatments that enhance patient care and decrease overall treatment costs by focusing on genetics and ¡°-omics¡± data obtained from patient biospecimens and records to guide therapy choices that generate good clinical outcomes. The approach relies on diagnostic and prognostic use of novel biomarkers discovered through combinations of tissue banking, bioinformatics, and electronic medical records (EMRs). The analytical power of bioinformatic platforms combined with patient clinical data from EMRs can reveal potential biomarkers and clinical phenotypes that allow researchers to develop experimental strategies using selected patient biospecimens stored in tissue banks. For cancer, high-quality biospecimens collected at diagnosis, first relapse, and various treatment stages provide crucial resources for study designs. To enlarge biospecimen collections, patient education regarding the value of specimen donation is vital. One approach for increasing consent is to offer publically available illustrations and game-like engagements demonstrating how wider sample availability facilitates development of novel therapies. The critical value of tissue bank samples, bioinformatics, and EMR in the early stages of the biomarker discovery process for personalized medicine is often overlooked. The data obtained also require cross-disciplinary collaborations to translate experimental results into clinical practice and diagnostic and prognostic use in personalized medicine. 1. Introduction Research in personalized medicine seeks to achieve optimal clinical outcomes through the use of innovative biomarker discoveries to develop drugs that best suit a specific group of patients. To derive best-fit treatment options for a specific patient group, various signaling pathways are thoroughly analyzed to identify altered molecular circuitry that initiates and maintains the clinical phenotype of the disease. For cancer, this altered signaling promotes a cascade of molecular events, that is, cell- or tissue type-dependent, and this relationship gives rise to a specific biomarker set that has a direct association with the cancer phenotype. The unique genetic profile of an individual patient¡¯s cancer will generate specific gene expression signatures and modifications of genes/miRNA, proteins, and metabolites. Current and future technologies will produce a flood of data, not only from the laboratory bench but also from clinical sources, and the association of these data with a specific cancer phenotype is expected to be more sensitive and to
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jo/2013/368751/