Science Digest: Advancing Personalized Medicine at Mayo Clinic
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Mayo Clinic’s exceptional care stems from its unwavering commitment to scientific discovery and innovation, leading to new treatments and cures. Below are three examples of how researchers are pursuing answers for patients with unmet needs.
A Deeper Understanding of Responses to Medication
By studying the human genome and revealing the many layers of individual health, Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine is working to prevent diseases before they happen, personalize treatments and cure more diseases.
One of these layers is pharmacoexposomics, which focuses on understanding how environmental exposures influence a person's response to medication. This understanding could enhance personalized medicine and better tailor treatment for every patient.
Pharmacoexposomics explores how drugs affect people by combining:
- Pharmacology, the study of drugs and their effects.
- Exposomics, the study of the exposures and other variable factors a person encounters over a lifetime.
- Social determinants of health.
Pharmacoexposomics is a complement to pharmacogenomics, which examines how genetic variation affects responses to medicines. An example of pharmacoexposomics can be seen in the way that drinking grapefruit juice can affect the body’s ability to process certain drugs.
Konstantinos Lazaridis, M.D., the Carlson and Nelson Endowed Executive Director for the Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine, is using various "omics" technologies to look for unique signatures of environmental exposures in biospecimens such as blood, urine and saliva that could help to guide therapy for a wide range of health conditions.
A New Hope for Early Detection of Endometrial and Ovarian Cancers
Like many forms of cancer, early detection of endometrial and ovarian cancers improves patient outcomes. Unlike many other cancers, however, there is currently no standard screening for early detection of these reproductive cancers.
Marina Walther-Antonio, Ph.D., and colleagues at the Center for Individualized Medicine are hoping to change that. Their research dives deep into the microbiome, a community of trillions of microorganisms on and inside the body — including bacteria, fungi and viruses — that influence health and disease. They have uncovered specific microbial signatures linked to endometrial and ovarian cancers and are working toward developing innovative home swab tests for women to assess their risk.
Endometrial and ovarian cancer are the sixth- and eighth-most common cancers among women globally. World Cancer Research Fund International reported 417,367 new cases of endometrial cancer and 97,370 deaths in 2020, and 313,959 new cases of ovarian cancer and 207,252 deaths in the same year. The incidence rate for endometrial cancer is expected to rise, driven by environmental factors, obesity and diabetes.
Tool Links Alzheimer’s Disease Types to Rate of Cognitive Decline
Mayo Clinic researchers continue to make significant strides in understanding how Alzheimer’s disease affects the brain.
In a recent study published in JAMA Neurology, Mayo Clinic researchers discovered a series of brain changes by using a "corticolimbic index" tool for Alzheimer’s disease. The team analyzed brain tissue samples from a multiethnic group of nearly 1,400 patients with Alzheimer's disease that were donated to the Mayo Clinic Brain Bank.
The new "corticolimbic index" tool assigns a score to the location of toxic tau protein tangles that damage cells, with the scores corresponding to specific brain regions associated with Alzheimer's disease. In the study, differences in where the tangles accumulated affected the progression of the disease.
By clarifying some of the microscopic pathology of Alzheimer’s disease, researchers hope to pinpoint biomarkers that may affect future treatments and patient care.
"The corticolimbic index is a score that could encourage a paradigm shift toward understanding the individuality of this complex disease and broaden our perspective,” says Melissa E. Murray, Ph.D., a translational neuropathologist at Mayo Clinic in Florida and senior author of the study. “This study marks a significant step toward personalized care, offering hope for more effective future therapies."
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