This special issue is focused on advancing genomics for drug development and safety evaluation. Gaining wide adoption in biomedical fields, genomic technologies have tremendously improved our molecular understanding of disease etiology and pathogenesis. Furthermore, the accumulated genomic datasets allow us to articulate new hypothesis, revisit and rethink the conventional paradigm for drug development and safety evaluation, and generate more efficient tools to promote biomedical researches.
Cancer genomics has made a great progress to uncover the underlying mechanism of tumorigenesis. Consequently, a lot of cancer genomic biomarkers have been developed for improving cancer diagnosis and prognosis. Questions arise on how the biomarkers developed from one study could be extrapolated to another. The advancement of machine learning technologies provides us a great opportunity to address these crucial questions such as model transfer and data integrity issues in the cancer field. R. Jing et al
Genomic technologies such as next-generation sequencing provided an unprecedented resolution to better understand complex regulatory relationship among different genetic elements. The consortium efforts such as The Cancer Genomics Atlas (TCGA) not only covers diverse cancer subtypes but also includes a lot of genomic elements and events (i.e., miRNA, copy number variation, and DNA methylation). Accordingly, the approaches to integrate these genomic elements to decipher the complex regulatory relationship tailored to different cancer mechanisms are urgently needed. J. Xue et al
Shift work is a common social issue due to the rapid pace of modern lifestyle. The disruption in circadian clock system leads to a lot of health concerns and increases the risk to develop serious diseases including sleep disorders, metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, and even cancers. S. Khan et al
Protein classification based on organisms is a hot topic in microbiology. Considering huge amount of protein sequencing data that were generated in the past two decades, supplicated model development strategies and novel approaches are needed to categorize the proteins from different organisms. H.-B. Guo et al
A lot of drug candidates in the clinical trial failed due to unexpected adverse drug reactions (ADRs). ADR especially idiosyncratic adverse drug reaction (IADR) is difficult to study. Drug-induced myopathy as an IADR is unpredictable and dose independent. To better understand the causes for drug-induced myopathy, D. Li et al
Many aspects of genomics were not covered in this special issue. For example, the reproducibility of genomic studies, inconsistent results from different data analysis pipelines, and data storage are also of great importance for better utilization of genomic technology to promote and improve public health. We hope this special issue could serve as a trigger to stimulate the common interest in the community for advancing genomic technologies.