Institute for Quantitative Health Science and  Engineering (IQ)

Department of Pharmacology & Toxicology

Michigan State University

Recent activities

Cancer and inflammatory diseases research: from the basics to the precision medicinePrecision medicine, or personalized medicine, is related to treatment based on the patient’s individual characteristics. To promote this personalized approach, diseases must accurately be diagnosed; specific biomarkers can predict disease evolution and optimize therapy based on each patient's characteristics such as their genetic background, lifestyle and environmental risk factors. Over the years, we have seen a revolution in pharmacotherapy and management of patients receiving personalized medicine, especially when we consider immunotherapy and specific tyrosine kinases inhibitors. Patients with inflammatory diseases, such as monogenetic diabetes and chronic kidney disease, have benefited from the progress made within the last decade related to our understanding of the genetic basis of diabetes. Similarly, patients in precision oncology, with breast, prostate and blood cancer have experienced better overall survival rates with targeted therapy such as trastuzumab (breast cancer), PARPs inhibitors (prostate cancer), imatinib, ibrutinib and venetoclax (leukemia). All these advancements have been aided by the investigation and identification of clinical and laboratory biomarkers, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and nanotechnology.In this context, emerging biotechnology applied to therapy investigation and liquid biopsies, which analyze the presence of alterations in nucleic acids and biomarkers, usually in peripheral blood or other biological fluids, bri...