Bioanalysis Zone Feature: “Discovery technologies for the multi-omics era of precision medicine”

Over the past decade, biomarker discovery has been critical to drug development. However, the vast majority of this discovery has focused on genomic markers. When you actually look at disease risk across common diseases, only 15–20% of risk of any given disease is attributable to genetics. Given the dynamic nature of disease, there is a need to extend to much more dynamic multi-omics processes to identify new targets and align individuals with their disease states. This is particularly important for precision medicine and the drug development process in general. Over the next 3–5 years, we anticipate a major evolution in this space, where the focus will shift from genomics to next-generation or beyond-genomics technologies, including metabolomics, lipidomics, proteomics and other such dynamic measures that are central to human health, disease and drug response.

Enabling the transition to the next era of precision drug development and personalized medicine requires technologies that are both robust and scalable. Robust in that the data they generate is highly accurate and precise, and scalable in that they can be applied efficiently across large populations. We’ve learned from the genomics revolution that technologies cannot be applied for discovery on small populations. We need large-scale datasets to gain the statistical power for a robust discovery process, especially when using humans as the model system for which discoveries are being initially made.