Worms as models for personalized medicine
Tailoring a person’s diet or medications based on their genome has been a goal of the medical community for decades, but the strategy has not been widely successful because people metabolize chemicals differently. A drug may work differently for two patients because they have different metabolisms, which may be due to genetic, environmental, or microbial differences. Researchers in the BTI laboratory of Professor Frank Schroeder and colleagues have used a simple roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, as an experimental model that could link genomic differences to differences in metabolism. The work was published in Nature on July 6. “Individuals have different metabolisms, and that’s important for how different diets, diseases, and medications affect us,” said Schroeder, one of the paper’s authors. “You need to find ways to tailor biomedical recommendations for different people based on their individual metabolism.” Understanding a person’s metabolism based on their genome is particular