Scientific advances in biomedical disciplines have allowed us to identify the underlying causes of many diseases with increased comprehension-leading the way towards precision medicine. In this context, unique disease and medical traits pave the way for the development of adapted disease management, drugs and therapies tailored to each patient. Bearing in mind that reductionism, an approach that has dominated biomedical research for many years and has resulted in the identification of definite cellular phenotypes and human diseases which are linked with specific integral molecules, we strongly believe that Alzheimer's Disease, one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases, could not be applied to the model of one disease-one assay-one drug. Regarding the discrete complexities in the molecular pathogenesis combined with the limited knowledge of inherited and sporadic forms of Alzheimer's disease, the great heterogeneity in the clinical development, as well as the plethora of validated biomarkers that have been proposed for early diagnosis or prognosis of the disease, we presume that a radically different way of thinking is in demand for comprehensive explanations of the molecular pathogenesis of the disease. In this article we highlight the most recent advances made in the omics field of systems biology towards a more complete understanding of Alzheimer's disease mechanisms, emphasizing to the paramount emergence of the development of various high-throughput strategies applied to the omics sciences.
The rise of precision medicine combined with the variety of biomedical data sources and their heterogeneous nature make the integration and exploration of information that they retain more complicated. In light of these issues, translational research platforms were developed as a promising solution. Research centers have used translational tools for the study of integrated data for hypothesis development and validation, cohort discovery and data-exploration. For this article, we reviewed the literature in order to determine the use of translational research platforms in precision medicine. These tools are used to support scientists in various domains regarding precision medicine research. We identified eight platforms: BRISK, iCOD, iDASH, tranSMART, the recently developed OncDRS, as well as caTRIP, cBio Cancer Portal and G-DOC. The last four platforms explore multidimensional data specifically for cancer research. We focused on tranSMART, for it is the most broadly used platform, since its development in 2012.
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