Troy Vargason

Personalized medicine, an emerging approach to healthcare, is based on customized drug target intervention strategies for individual patients. It is motivated by the fact that the genetic code is unique to a person and, as genes represent a blueprint of proteins to be produced, changes in the genetic code may result in the production of proteins with altered functions. In some cases these alterations are of no consequence, but other changes, particularly mutations in important genes, can have detrimental effects on a person's phenotype. Personalized medicine seeks to make use of a person's genetic code to derive treatment strategies that are directly tailored to affect their phenotype.

Given that personalized medicine is a developing field with many areas of active research, my work will have two primary aims: (1) to develop essential computational tools for personalized medicine, and (2) to apply the developed techniques to one particular system, the methylation cycle.