The promise of personalized medicine
September 7, 2004
A new technology developed at IBM could bring the promise of personalized medicine one step closer to reality.
The “Genomic Messaging System” (GMS) uses a “smart” DNA stream that contains a patient’s entire medical record in compressed form as well as genetic information. The DNA stream could potentially even house images like MRIs and X-rays.
The objective is to allow researchers to see correlations between human disease and the architecture of individual genes, which could eventually lead to “personalized medicine,” allowing doctors to prescribe the right drug at the right dose for the right person, based on unique variations in their DNA.
“GMS links archives of digital patient records to enable analysis of those records by a variety of bioinformatic and computational biology tools,” says Barry Robson, a chemist at IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center. These tools include data mining to discover unexpected relationships, large-scale epidemiological studies and three-dimensional modeling of patient proteins to study the effect of “SNiPs” — single nucleotide polymorphisms, which are variations in genetic code that can help pinpoint the location of genes that might influence certain diseases.