Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Engineer Better Medicines
Engineer Better Medicines
octors have long known that people differ in susceptibility to disease and response to medicines.
But, with little guidance for understanding and adjusting to individual differences, treatments
developed have generally been standardized for the many, rather than the few.
Traditional vaccines have demonstrated the ability to prevent diseases, and even eradicate some such as smallpox. It may
be possible to design vaccines to treat diseases as well. Personalized vaccines might be envisioned for either use. But,
more effective and reliable manufacturing methods are needed for vaccines, especially when responding to a need for mass
immunization in the face of a pandemic.
References
Erwin P. Bottinger, “Foundations, Promises, and Uncertainties of Personalized Medicine,” Mount Sinai Journal of
Medicine 74 (2007), pp. 15-21.
Manfred Dietel and Christine Sers, “Personalized medicine and development of targeted therapies: The upcoming challenge
for diagnostic molecular pathology. A review,” Virchows Arch 448 (2006), pp. 744-755.
David L. Heymann, “Resistance to Anti-Infective Drugs and the Threat to Public Health,” Cell 124 (February 24, 2006), pp.
671-675. DOI 10.1016/j.cell.2006.02.009.
W. Kalow, “Pharmacogenetics and pharmacogenomics: Origin, status, and the hope for personalized medicine,” The
Pharmacogenomics Journal 6 (2006), pp. 162-165. doi:10.1038/sj.tpj.6500361
L.J. Lesko, “Personalized Medicine: Elusive Dream or Imminent Reality?”Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics 81 (June
2007), pp. 807-816.
M.P. Lutolf and J.A. Hubbell, “Synthetic biomaterials as instructive extracellular microenvironments for morphogenesis in
tissue engineering,” Nature Biotechnology 23 (January 2005), pp. 47-55.
Gerard D. Wright and Arlene D. Sutherland, “New strategies for combatingmultidrug-resistant bacteria,” Trends in Molecular
Medicine 13 (2007), pp. 260-267. doi:10.1016/j.molmed.2007.04.004.
Mike West et al., “Embracing the complexity of genomic data for personalized medicine,” Genome Research 16 (2006), pp.
559-566.