Smart Biotech Scientist Podcast: “Drug Development is Due for Disruption” [Part 1]

“You asked, ‘what is the power and potential of multi-omics analysis?’ I always like to bring things down to a number if I can, so we can think about population-attributable disease risk. That is, how much of disease risk over someone’s lifetime can you explain by current information? And so if we go back 25 years to the dawn of genomic sequencing, the promise of genomics as a whole was that it was the first omics to be readily scaled to large populations, and therefore was going to revolutionize our understanding of human biology and disease processes – and subsequently revolutionize target identification, validation, and drug development.

In no way do I want to minimize the value of genomics, because we’ve learned a tremendous amount from it, but the reality is that this promise hasn’t largely come due. And you can think about risk in explaining this. What we know now from large genomic sequencing efforts like the UK Biobank and many other such studies is that your risk of developing disease is only about 15-20% attributable to your genome. And that opens up the question, well, what is the remaining risk of human disease attributable to? This is where multi-omics analysis comes in, to explain that missing 80-90% of risk, and in doing so can finally realize the full potential of omics data in accelerating drug development.