Bioinformatics to Sort Biomarker Data for Personalized Medicine

In 2012, the Center of Excellence for the Prevention of Organ Failure (PROOF) and IO Informatics started collaboration to develop a web-based software application addressing chronic heart, lung, and kidney diseases. The application will be developed so that clinicians can use it on handheld device and other technology, and it will be used with blood tests developed by the PROOF Center (http://www. proofcentre.ca/) that target chronic disease and transplantation. Its biomarker programs will be used to develop simple blood tests to improve prediction, diagnosis, management and treatment of diseases, by harnessing the power of clinical, molecular and computational science. It has biomarker programs across a multitude of disease indications.The application will give an overall score indicating patient risk level and associated clinical recommendations to help guide decision making. The scores and recommendations will be based on gene expression data, protein expression data, and longitudinal clinical observations. Future applications of the technology will enable automated, pre-symptomatic screening for biomarker- based risk events, disease severity characterization, and treatments that are suitable for individual patients.