Human lymphoblastoid cell lines: a valuable tool for personalized medicine research
Over the last two decades, and in particular since the completion of the Human Genome Project, medicine has been slowly but persistently moving towards personalized medicine – medical treatments tailored for the individual patient based on genetic and genomic information derived from patients' biological samples (blood samples and biopsied tissues). A major aim of this approach is to prescribe the right drug at the right dosage and right time for each patient. Another key aim of precision medicine is allowing earlier disease diagnosis, so that patients are treated with preventive therapeutics before the disease has caused irreparable damage. However, personalized medicine research is often hampered by high costs and lack of high-quality biological samples. Human lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) are an affordable research tool that can be of high value for disease and drug response biomarker discovery in the context of personalized medicine exploration and can be obtained from many human biobanks.
