The identification of genetic lesions that affect tumor sensitivity to targeted therapies is a major objective of precision medicine. Two reports in this issue combine tumor genome analyses with functional characterization to uncover activating mutations in MTOR that confer sensitivity to a clinically used mTOR inhibitor.

DNA sequencing has revolutionized biological and medical research, and is poised to have a similar impact in medicine. This tool is just one of a number of developments in our capability to identify, quantitate and functionally characterize the components of the biological networks keeping us healthy or making us sick, but in many respects it has played the leading role in this process. The new...

Studying the interaction and interplay of many levels of biological information, systems biology will enable us to not only cure complex disease but to predict an individual’s health and extend the human body’s natural lifespan by preventing diseases. The new era of predictive, preventive and personalized medicine—made possible by application of systems biology—represents a profound shift in th...

Personalised medicine is an emerging model that will revolutionise our current healthcare system. In the last decade, several genomic aberrations were discovered that are now used as predictive markers for treatment with targeted therapeutics. The technological advances in the last few years, such as the development of high resolution DNA microarrays or second generation sequencers, have led to...

In recognition of the expanding field of precision medicine and the desire to give the right person the right medicine at the right time, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine took up the task of making recommendations about molecular biomarkers. The consensus committee met throughout 2015 and released the report ‘‘Biomarker Tests for Molecularly Targeted Therapies: Key ...

Overlapping functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity elicited by physical pain and social rejection has posited a common neural representation between the two experiences. However, Woo and colleagues (Nat Commun 5: 5380, 2014) recently used multivariate statistics to challenge the "shared representation" theory of pain. This study has implications in the way results from fMRI studi...

A treatment regime formalizes personalized medicine as a function from individual patient characteristics to a recommended treatment. A high-quality treatment regime can improve patient outcomes while reducing cost, resource consumption, and treatment burden. Thus, there is tremendous interest in estimating treatment regimes from observational and randomized studies. However, the development of...

Historically, biomedical research has been based on two paradigms. First, measurements of biological behaviors have been based on bulk assays that average over large populations. Second, these behaviors have then been crudely perturbed by systemic administration of therapeutic treatments. Nanotechnology has the potential to transform these paradigms by enabling exquisite structures comparable i...