ABSTRACT
Personalized medicine has emerged as a promising approach to
designing and developing new drugs for disease interventions based
on the individual characteristics of each patient. Because the true
worth of personalized medicine heavily relies on our understanding
of how patients’ unique molecular and genetic profile makes them
susceptible to a certain disease, an increasing body of study has
been conducted to identify specific genes and their interactions that
contribute to interpersonal variability in drug response. However,
many of these studies focus on simple statistical associations
between genes and physiological variables that describe drug
efficacy or drug toxicity without integrating the mechanistic basis
of drug reactions in a patient’s body. A novel model for mapping
genes through design principles of biological systems can enhance
the elucidation of the genetic architecture for drug response. This
model, called systems mapping, incorporates a group of differential
equations to quantify the main, epistatic, or pleiotropic effects of
genes on biochemical pathways in drug response. In this chapter,
we describe a general framework of systems mapping applied
to gene mapping for drug response. We pinpoint that systems
mapping should provide a computational tool for pharmacogenetic
or pharmacogenomic research toward personalized medicine.
