The Impact of Nanotechnology on the Future of Personalized Medicine

Personalized medicine as a revolutionary in medicine provides medical services tailored to a person's molecular characteristics. In personalized medicine, the physician with the knowledge of information in the person’s molecular profile (omics) can prescribe an effective drug with minimal side effects and appropriate dose for changing lifestyle and diet to prevent and treat diseases.Theoretically, the molecular profile of each individual could give some information about risk of diseases, the person responses to medications and the relationship between person molecular profile and certain traits, such as lactose intolerance and diet-specific adaptation.In the past, it was impossible to confirm the presence or absence of mutations in an individual's genome, as the use of molecular techniques such as PCR was very time consuming and was associated with many limitations. On the other hand, many traits and diseases are multigenic and the consequence of interaction with environment. Furthermore mathematical models for measuring genetic risk were not developed.In recent years, creation of individual genetic profile with determination of a person's genotype and all known mutations in a short time and at low cost became possible, due to advances in microarray technology, computer science and statistics.In parallel with genomics, advances in other multidisciplinary sciences such as nanotechnology and systematic biology have facilitated the disease interactions at the cellular and molecular scale. Nanomedicine has provided the control of drug release profiles using design and fabrication of nanostructured devices, so it is hoped that by combining these information and examining their interactions, better contribution to human health will be achieved. In this review, we focused on nanotechnology applications and solutions that impact on personalized medicine and accelerate its progress and development.