Epigenetics advancing personalized nanomedicine in cancer therapy

Personalized medicine aims to deliver the right drug to a right patient at the right time. It offers unique opportunities to integrate new technologies and concepts to disease prognosis, diagnosis and therapeutics. While selective personalized therapies are conceptually impressive, the majority of cancer therapies have dismal outcome. Such therapeutic failure could result from no response, drug resistance, disease relapse or severe side effect from improper drug delivery. Nanomedicine, the application of nanotechnology in medicine, has a potential to advance the identification of diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers and the delivery of right drug to disease sites. Epigenetic aberrations dynamically contribute to cancer pathogenesis. Given the individualized traits of epigenetic biomarkers, epigenetic considerations would significantly refine personalized nanomedicine. This review aims to dissect the interface of personalized medicine with nanomedicine and epigenetics. I will outline the progress and highlight challenges and areas that can be further explored perfecting the personalized health care.

Graphical abstractTrue sense of personalized nanomedicine. The uniqueness of patients' environmental and intrinsic stimuli makes individualized epigenetic signatures, which reciprocally determine the pattern of epigenetic and genetic alterations. The combination of both epigenetic and genetic attributes provides individual diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers informing the treatment plans. Nanotechnology can advance the identification of biomarkers and deliver the drug to the disease sites, whose application will increase the therapeutic window of personalized medicine. The coalition of personalized nanomedicine with individualized epigenetic information will accomplish the best health care.Figure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload high-quality image (233 K)Download as PowerPoint slide