Chapte‘ 15
P‘o’pect’ of ŕOmic’ Ba’ed Molecula‘ App‘oache’ in
Colo‘ectal Cance‘ Diagno’i’ and T‘eatment in the
Developing Wo‘ld: A Ca’e Study in Cape Town, South
Af‘ica
Henry Adeola, Ryan William Goosen,
Paul Goldberg and Jonathan Blackburn
Additional information is available at the end of the chapter
http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/57485
ŗ. Introduction
The emergence of the field of genomics, proteomics and more recently lipidomics in science
has advanced diagnostic and therapeutic medicine in no small measure. These fields typically
deal with the documentation of the identity, abundance and localization of DN“, RN“, protein
and lipid biomolecules in a given cell, tissue or organism. “n in-depth knowledge of the
biologic and physiologic localization, chemistry, and methodology for isolation of these
essential biomolecules is key to a successful analysis and interpretation of information
retrieved in the ȁomics field.
The recent rapid development of these fields can be accounted for by the concurrent develop‐
ment of new state of the art, high throughput technologies such as real time qualitative
polymerase chain reaction ǻRTqPCRǼ, microarrays, flow cytometry, mass spectrometry and
sequencing. These high throughput technologies have found extensive utility in diverse areas
of human biology, particularly following the completion of the human genome project ǻHGPǼ
in ŘŖŖř. This project, which successfully documented the full complement of genes present
physiologically within the human cell, gave a scientific platform to newer experimental
initiatives thereafter.
Clinical application of ȁOmics based approaches have gained popularity and are believed to
be the future of medicine because of its inherent ability to determine disease-associated
changes in the human genome, transcriptome, proteome, lipidome and metabolome. Docu‐
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