Connecting chemosensitivity, gene expression and disease.

Omics-based investigations offer potentially powerful readouts that might be useful for probing the underlying biology of normal and diseased states, identifying novel therapeutic targets and proposing relevant markers for designing treatment strategies. A vital component of these investigations involves a systematic analysis of gene expression and chemosensitivity data in the context of disease states and small molecule probes into the function of targets responsible for a disease phenotype. Systematic analysis of chemical and pharmacogenetics data offers a possible means to identify novel, small-molecule, potentially therapeutic, agents that affect the phenotype of a particular target. Elegantly simple in concept, the covariation of genetic and chemosensitivity readouts provide a hypothetical link for relating compounds through genomic expression profiles to underlying biology.