As over 1000 new cases of HIV/AIDS occur in Korea annually, preventive health programs against HIV/AIDS are urgently needed. Since phylodynamic studies have been suggested as a way to understand how infectious diseases are transmitted and evolve, phylodynamic inferences can be a useful tool for HIV/AIDS research. In particular, phylodynamic models are helpful for dating the origins of an epidemic and estimating its basic reproduction number. Thus, the introduction of phylodynamics would be a highly valuable step towards controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Korea.
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Korean summary
국내 HIV/AIDS 신환자가 지속적으로 발생하고 있는 상황에서, 다른 나라에서는 HIV 감염관리에 계통역동학을 적용하고 있다.
이는 감염원과 감염경로를 알아내고, 기본재생산지수를 산출하도록 해주기 때문이다.
따라서 국내 HIV/AIDS 관리를 위해 계통역동학 적용을 적극 제안한다.”
Biomarkers are characteristic biological properties that can be detected and measured in a variety of biological matrices in the human body, including the blood and tissue, to give an indication of whether there is a threat of disease, if a disease already exists, or how such a disease may develop in an individual case. Along the continuum from exposure to clinical disease and progression, exposure, internal dose, biologically effective dose, early biological effect, altered structure and/or function, clinical disease, and disease progression can potentially be observed and quantified using biomarkers. While the traditional discovery of biomarkers has been a slow process, the advent of molecular and genomic medicine has resulted in explosive growth in the discovery of new biomarkers. In this review, issues in evaluating biomarkers will be discussed and the biomarkers of environmental exposure, early biologic effect, and susceptibility identified and validated in epidemiological studies will be summarized. The spectrum of genomic approaches currently used to identify and apply biomarkers and strategies to validate genomic biomarkers will also be discussed.
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