Omics-Based Nanopharmacy: Powerful Tools Toward Precision Medicine

The heterogeneity between patients, and within a particular disease, limits the success of the therapeutic approaches. Moreover, most therapeutic modalities lack specificity and thus majority of drugs might induce various adverse effects. Precision medicine aims to individualize therapeutic interventions, based on the growing understanding of the human multiple “-oms” (such as genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, and the microbiome), which has led to the discovery of numerous biomarkers that can be used to detect early-stage diseases and predict disease progression, drug response, and clinical outcome. The use of nanovectors to carry drugs, imaging agents, and theranostics probes holds great promise for revolutionizing disease management such as delivery of therapeutic and imaging payloads and ultimately can maximize the treatment while minimizing side effects. Precision (also often named “Personalized”) nanomedicine has the power of combining nanomedicine with “OMICS” data such as clinical and molecular biomarkers achieving improve prognosis and disease management as well as individualized drug selection and dosage profiling to ensure efficacy and safety. In this chapter, we present the current leading technologies available of personalized medicine. We discusses the immense potential of combining two branches of technology, nanocarriers that act as small pharmacies (termed here “nanopharmacy”; NP) and high-throughput OMICS technologies that pave the way toward modern precision medicine.