| Scientific research has long been the basis
for improving medicine and health care. With rapid advancement
in genomics, proteomics, and other molecular based studies,
the approach to prevention, detection, and treatment of
disease is changing. Conventional approach treat “average”
patients with a standardized treatment that responds to
the symptoms of a disease. Treatments do not take into
account that nearly every disease has genetic and environmental
components, which will alter the manifestation of disease
in patients differently. Personalized medicine will allow
customized treatment for patients. This treatment will
respond on the molecular level, through an understanding
of the mechanisms and pathways of disease together with
the distinctive genetic code of the patient. Personalized
medicine will improve the ability to predict develop a
disease, as well as predict response to treatment options.
Studying molecular biomarkers will allow the development
of diagnostic tests that reveal diseases at their infancy,
enable more effective therapeutic treatments based on
molecular fingerprints that can be individually tailored,
and create advanced drug discovery processes by identifying
novel drug targets that are linked to the fundamental
mechanisms of a disease.
Amersham Biosciences has the scientific tools for
the integrated approach necessary to reach the goals
of personalized medicine. Gene expression studies will
link deviations in gene expression to particular diseases.
Optimization of drug selection for the most effective
treatment and least side effects are achieved through
sequencing and genotyping. High-throughput screening
for testing of thousands of compounds against a target
will provide more effective ways to “fail”
drugs earlier in the development process. Proteomics
applications to drug discovery, diagnostics and therapy
are an integral component of personalized medicine.
Protein expression studies using will lead to discovery
of biomarkers for early detection of disease and identification
of protein expression changes resulting from development
and treatment of disease. All of this work depends on
automated processing for accurate protein analysis and
identification, and is part of Amersham Biosciences
integrated approach to proteomics. Scierra
Laboratory Workflow System links the processes, enabling
the collection, comparison, and utilization of information
across applications resulting in one complete integrated
system. |
