Global Systems Biology, Personalized Medicine, and Molecular Epidimiology

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/pmc/articles/PMC1682018/

The article starts by stating that "personalized healthcare solutions", the ability to deliver effective therapies that are tailored to the exact biology or biological state of an individual, is one of the 21st century's great medical challenges. Achieving personalized healthcare solutions would involve an effective system of patient evaluation so that proper diagnosis, drug dosage, and intervention can occur. The article also states that the most practical and efficient evaluation would be through some sort of system of patient stratification in which individuals are biologically subclassified and biofeatures modeled in relation to outcome. What makes this idea so important and ground breaking is that not only would it be more efficient in treating patients, but it would also be a lot safer for the patients because doctors would effectively give proper dosages which would lower the number side effects and adverse reactions. The fact that this would lower side effects and would be much safer for the average patient is a continuous theme that seems to popping up through out a lot of the personalized medicine articles. This is such a pertinent subject because medicall efficacy and safety have been a huge topic in the current public health care debate because of harmful medicines like Vioxx that passed through FDA regulations. The article brings up an interesting point about a "top-down " approach where metrics of the systemic homeostatic activity are obtained based on mathematical models of a pre-dose metabolic profiles; this is called Pharmaco-metabonomics. In the article they use this as an alternative or supplemental method to correctly diagnosing patients, but i feel like this system might be flawed. By condensing proper diagnosis to a simple mathematical model I feel like we will not cure the people who are outliers or medical anomalies, which in turn would not answer the main question; how do we make medicine more effective and personalized?