Promise of personalized omics to precision medicine

Abstract

The rapid development of high-throughput technologies and computational frameworks enables the examination of biological systems in unprecedented detail. The ability to study biological phenomena at omics levels in turn is expected to lead to significant advances in personalized and precision medicine. Patients can be treated according to their own molecular characteristics. Individual omes as well as the integrated profiles of multiple omes, such as the genome, the epigenome, the transcriptome, the proteome, the metabolome, the antibodyome, and other omics information are expected to be valuable for health monitoring, preventative measures, and precision medicine. Moreover, omics technologies have the potential to transform medicine from traditional symptom-oriented diagnosis and treatment of diseases toward disease prevention and early diagnostics. We discuss here the advances and challenges in systems biology-powered personalized medicine at its current stage, as well as a prospective view of future personalized health care at the end of this review.

Figure 1

Example personalized RiskGraph. Each horizontal line symbolizes genetic risk of one disease tested for a specific individual. The tail of each arrow shows the pretest probability of a disease in a population of certain ethnicity, age and gender. The frond end of each arrow displays the posttest probability with consideration of the person’s genomic information. Red arrow, increased risk; green arrow, decreased risk.

Figure 2

The concept of integrative Personal Omics Profile (iPOP). Physiological status of the body can be reflected by the integrated profiles of different omic profiles, as well as the interactions amongst them.