A Roadmap towards Precision Medicine for Multiple Sclerosis

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease and this affects roughly 2.8 million people worldwide. This is a highly heterogeneous disease in terms of course, clinical symptoms and response treatment. The exact pathogenesis and aetiology of this disease remain unknown. The lack of successful treatment can be explained by the heterogeneous nature of MS with patients exhibiting widely disparate clinical features and progression patterns resulting in phenotypic heterogeneity. Therefore, there is a need for the development of biomarkers for MS. The “Omics” approaches have been exploited for the development of biomarkers although the system biology was taken into consideration. With the introduction of Omics approaches, personalized medicine has gained potential revealing hitherto unseen elements of illness causation, initiation and progression. This chapter will focus on the potential role of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics in MS for the possible identification of biomarkers facilitating and augmenting the concept of precision medicine.

Keywords: Biomarkers, Early diagnosis and precision medicine, Multiple sclerosis, Omics approaches.