The potential application of personalized preventive research

PharmActa: Personalized pharmaceutical care eHealth platform for patients and pharmacists

Community pharmacists are critically placed in the patient care chain being an extended frontline within primary healthcare networks across Europe. They are trained to ensure safe and effective medication use, a crucial and responsible role, extending beyond the common misconception limited to just providing timely access to medicines for the population. Technology-wise, eHealth being committed to an effective, networked, patient-centered and accessible healthcare would prove a real asset in this direction by achieving improved therapy adherence with better outcomes and direct contribution to a cost-effective healthcare system. In this work, we present PharmActa, a personalized eHealth platform that addresses key features of pharmaceutical care and enhances communication of pharmacists with patients for optimizing pharmacotherapy. PharmActa empowers patients by providing pharmaceutical care services, such as drug interactions tools, reminders for assisting adhesion and compliance, information regarding adverse drug reactions, as well as pharmacovigilance along with related tools for healthcare management. In addition, it allows the pharmacists to review the medication history in order to provide personalized pharmaceutical care services; thus enhancing their role as healthcare providers. Finally, a mechanism allowing such a system to be interconnected with a developed medical repository following European and International interoperability standards, is also presented. Thus far, the evaluation results presented in this work indicate that PharmActa can be of great benefit to healthcare professionals, especially pharmacists and patients.

Synthetic biology-based cellular biomedical tattoo for detection of hypercalcemia associated with cancer

Diagnosis marks the beginning of any successful therapy. Because many medical conditions progress asymptomatically over extended periods of time, their timely diagnosis remains difficult, and this adversely affects patient prognosis. Focusing on hypercalcemia associated with cancer, we aimed to develop a synthetic biology-inspired biomedical tattoo using engineered cells that would (i) monitor long-term blood calcium concentration, (ii) detect onset of mild hypercalcemia, and (iii) respond via subcutaneous accumulation of the black pigment melanin to form a visible tattoo. For this purpose, we designed cells containing an ectopically expressed calcium-sensing receptor rewired to a synthetic signaling cascade that activates expression of transgenic tyrosinase, which produces melanin in response to persistently increased blood Ca²⁺ We confirmed that the melanin-generated color change produced by this biomedical tattoo could be detected with the naked eye and optically quantified. The system was validated in wild-type mice bearing subcutaneously implanted encapsulated engineered cells. All animals inoculated with hypercalcemic breast and colon adenocarcinoma cells developed tattoos, whereas no tattoos were seen in animals inoculated with normocalcemic tumor cells. All tumor-bearing animals remained asymptomatic throughout the 38-day experimental period. Although hypercalcemia is also associated with other pathologies, our findings demonstrate that it is possible to detect hypercalcemia associated with cancer in murine models using this cell-based diagnostic strategy.