Identification of Biomarkers for the Prevention of Chronic Disease

One of the goals of personalised medicine (PM) is to use the ever-growing understanding of biology to provide a higher level of precision in disease prevention and patient care. PM strategies include the use of decision-making processes based on biomarker-driven approaches. Genes, gene expression products (i.e. transcripts and proteins) and metabolites are the main biomarker families. Given this molecular diversity of biomarkers, the increase in high-throughput omics technologies offers an amazing opportunity to capture the whole picture of biological systems in a hypothesis-free and unbiased model. This chapter examines as the high-throughput era in omics is progressing and as genomics and other omics will be effective in disentangling the aetiology and progression of the diseases.