THE DEVELOPMENT AND APPLICATION OF BIOINFORMATICS TOOLS FOR PRECISE AND QUANTITATIVE THERAPEUTIC INVESTIGATIONS

Abstract

This thesis introduced the development and application of two bioinformatics databases for facilitating precision medicine research and natural product (NP)-based drug discovery. I developed the HEROD to provide genomic data of 60283 human samples from diverse ethnic/regional populations, representing a unique resource for ethnic/regional related genomic studies on human diseases including cancers. Based on HEROD, I analysed the difference of gene expression profiles and its clinical relevance between Asian and non-Asian non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. The results indicated that Asian and non-Asian NSCLC exhibit different clinically relevant genomic profiles, indicating the molecular clues of ethnic disparities and suggesting that ethnicity should be considered when generalizing genomics-based precision cancer medicine across populations. Moreover, I developed NPASS to provide large-scale quantitative activities of 35032 NPs through extensively mining literature and other resources. NPASS will largely facilitate the NP discovery, optimization of in-silico algorithms for NP-tailored applications, and NP-based drug discovery.