Sex-Specific Genomic Biomarkers for Individualized Treatment of Life-Threatening Diseases

Numerous studies have demonstrated sex differences in drug reactions to the same drug treatment, steering away from the traditional view of one-size-fits-all medicine. A premise of this study is that the sex of a patient influences difference in disease characteristics and risk factors. In this study, we intend to exploit and to obtain better sex-specific biomarkers from gene-expression data. We propose a procedure to isolate a set of important genes as sex-specific genomic biomarkers, which may enable more effective patient treatment. A set of sex-specific genes is obtained by a variable importance ranking using a combination of cross-validation methods. The proposed procedure is applied to three gene-expression datasets.