ORLANDO, Fla.—The genome project sequenced all three billion base pairs of human DNA, revealing the instructions cells need to build all the proteins in the body. But that was just a warm-up, according to Thomas C. Spelsberg, PhD, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
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March 2010“Medical genomics is evolving into individualized medicine,” Dr. Spelsberg said at a guest lecture at the Triological Society’s Combined Sections Meeting held here Feb. 4-7. “You can start looking at disease biomarkers, new targeted drugs, disease subcategories, predispositions to diseases and even pharmacogenomics, which is individualized drug metabolism. This is the future, folks.”
Dr. Spelsberg, the George M. Eisenberg Professor in the department of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Mayo Graduate School of Medicine, explained that medical genomics has given way to transcriptonomics, the study of all the mRNAs (messenger RNAs) that code for proteins. Other areas medical genomics has evolved into include preoteomics, the study of all the proteins in cells or organisms, and metabolomics, the study of the activity of cell proteins and enzymes.