News Release

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

New analysis consortium will develop modern methods for medical research involving ancestrally various populations.

The National Institutes of Health is establishing the Multi-Omics for Health and Disease Consortium, with roughly $11 million awarded within the consortium’s first yr of funding. The new consortium goals to advance the technology and evaluation of “multi-omic” information for human well being analysis.

Multi-omics refers to a analysis strategy that comes with a number of “omics” information varieties derived from totally different analysis areas — corresponding to genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics. Each of those information varieties reveals distinct details about totally different facets of a organic system, and leveraging all these information varieties without delay is turning into more and more doable with advances in high-throughput applied sciences and information science. 

The integration of a number of sorts of information from a person participant’s organic pattern can present a extra holistic view of the molecular elements and mobile processes concerned in human well being and illness, together with untangling genetic and non-genetic elements in well being and illness. Such an strategy gives nice promise in areas corresponding to defining illness subtypes, figuring out biomarkers and discovering drug targets.

“Beyond gaining insights into individual diseases, the primary goal of this consortium is to develop scalable and generalizable multi-omics research strategies as well as methods to analyze these large and complex datasets,” mentioned Joannella Morales, Ph.D., a National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) program director concerned in main the consortium. “We expect these strategies will ultimately be adopted by other research groups, ensuring the consortium’s work will have broad and long-lasting impacts for clinical research.”

Approximately half of the awarded funds will assist the work of six illness research websites, which is able to look at situations corresponding to fatty liver ailments, hepatocellular carcinoma, bronchial asthma, continual kidney illness and preeclampsia, amongst others. The websites will enroll analysis members, at the very least 75% of whom shall be from ancestral backgrounds underrepresented in genomics analysis. The websites may even gather information on members’ environments and social determinants of well being for use together with the multi-omics information. Combining the multi-omic and environmental information can provide an much more complete view of the elements that contribute to illness danger and outcomes.

Specimens supplied by members shall be processed on the omics manufacturing heart, which is able to use high-throughput molecular assays to generate genomic, epigenomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and metabolomic information that shall be analyzed to generate molecular profiles of illness and non-disease states. The information evaluation and coordination heart will then incorporate all of those information into massive, organized datasets that shall be made accessible to the scientific neighborhood for additional research.

“Multi-omics studies are at the forefront of biomedical research and promise to advance our understanding of disease onset and progression,” mentioned Erin Ramos, Ph.D., M.P.H., deputy director of NHGRI’s Division of Genomic Medicine. “All while potentially providing important clues for treatment design and drug-discovery efforts. This new consortium is an important step in making those advances a reality.”

Approximately $50.3 million shall be awarded to the consortium over 5 years, pending the supply of funds. The award is funded collectively by NHGRI, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).

Multi-Omics for Health and Disease Consortium

Disease research websites and principal investigators

• Louise Laurent, M.D., Ph.D., University of California, San Diego
• Krzysztof Kiryluk, M.D., Columbia University — New York City
• Stephanie Christenson, M.D., University of California, San Francisco — co-funded with NIEHS
• Vaia Lida Chatzi, M.D., Ph.D., University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine — Los Angeles — co-funded with NIEHS
• Tanika N. Kelly, M.D., M.P.H., Tulane University — New Orleans — co-funded with NIEHS
• Joseph McCormick, M.D., University of Texas Health Science Center — Houston — funded by NCI

Omics manufacturing heart and principal investigator

• Gary J. Patti, Ph.D., Washington University — St. Louis

Data evaluation and coordinating heart and principal investigator

• Zhiping Weng, Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School — Worcester — co-funded with NCI

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is likely one of the 27 institutes and facilities on the NIH, an company of the Department of Health and Human Services. The NHGRI Division of Intramural Research develops and implements expertise to know, diagnose and deal with genomic and genetic ailments. Additional details about NHGRI might be discovered at: https://www.genome.gov/.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):
NIH, the nation’s medical analysis company, contains 27 Institutes and Centers and is a element of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the first federal company conducting and supporting primary, medical, and translational medical analysis, and is investigating the causes, therapies, and cures for each frequent and uncommon ailments. For extra details about NIH and its packages, go to www.nih.gov.

NIH…Turning Discovery Into Health^®

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