The Role of Omics in Clinical and Pharmaceutical Researches

Completion of the human genome project revealed that the molecular mechanisms of cellular responses to different situations cannot be predicted from the sequence of their genes. Hence, most biological researches are focused on the roles of proteins which are much more challenging tasks. Omics technologies, instead of analyzing individual components of an organism by conventional biochemical methods such as the function of a gene, protein or biochemical reaction, study all the components and their interactions within a global site. In the past two decades, omics technologies have been used as efficient and powerful tools in almost all aspects of clinical and pharmaceutical researches, including biomarker discovery, drug target discovery, evaluation of the efficacy of drugs, safety assessment, and personalized medicine. In this article, omics technologies such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics, and their advances are reviewed and their applications in clinical and pharmaceutical researches, particularly in the areas of drug targets, biomarkers, and personalized medicine are discussed.