Omics-based nanomedicine: The future of personalized oncology

The traditional "one treatment fits all" paradigm disregards the heterogeneity between cancer patients, and within a particular tumor, thus limit the success of common treatments. Moreover, current treatment lacks specificity and therefore most of the anticancer drugs induce severe adverse effects. Personalized medicine aims to individualize therapeutic interventions, based on the growing knowledge of the human multiple '-oms' (e.g. genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome), which has led to the discovery of various biomarkers that can be used to detect early stage cancers and predict tumor progression, drug response, and clinical outcome. Nanomedicine, the application of nanotechnology to healthcare, holds great promise for revolutionizing disease management such as drug delivery, molecular imaging, reduced adverse effects and the ability to contain both therapeutic and diagnostic modalities simultaneously termed theranostics. Personalizednanomedicine has the power of combining nanomedicine with clinical and molecular biomarkers ("OMICS" data) achieving improve prognosis and disease management as well as individualized drug selection and dosage profiling to ensure maximal efficacy and safety. Tumor's heterogeneity sets a countless challenge for future personalized therapy in cancer, however the use of multi-parameter 'omic's data for specific molecular biomarkers recognition together with versatile drug delivery nanocarriers, which could target concomitantly and specifically tumor cells subpopulations, might heralds a brighter future for personalized cancer management. In this review, we present the current leading technologies available for personalized oncology. We discusses the immense potential of combining the best of these two worlds, nanomedicine and high throughput OMICS technologies to pave the way towards cancer personalized medicine. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.