Curators' Favorite Papers

Russ Altman’s recent commentary in Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics highlights the importance of integrating personal genomic information with traditional health information in order to use it for 'personalized medicine' [PMID: 23241835]. PharmGKB’s PI uses a hypothetical example to illustrate how general population-based data can be combined with individual genomic data to create an updated estimate of drug response. In his commentary, Altman concludes that, "We can use Bayesian reasoning to integrate prior knowledge and new sources of data to estimate key clinical probabilities. We then evaluate these in the context of the anticipated value of each outcome to make the best clinical decisions possible... we can make each individual patient a small experiment that contributes to better estimates of these probabilities—a rapid-learning paradigm. We will thus continuously improve our understanding of how to use these powerful new measurements for precise and accurate clinical decisions."