Omic or Multi-omics Approach Can Save The Mankind

Abstract

The publication of the first draft of human genome, has led to the explosion of high throughput technologies including genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomic, proteomics, and metabolomics aiming to characterize the various biological molecules (DNA, RNA, proteins, and metabolites). These high throughput technologies collectively called as omics revolutionized medical research in the last two decades. The advent of next generation sequencing (NGS) reduced the time and economic cost of traditional sequencing and has led to the emergence of genomics as the first discipline of omics. Following the emergence of genomics, a number of projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), 1000 Genome Project (1KGP), and the International Cancer Genome Consortium have been accomplished. These projects contributed significantly to the understanding of genetic variations in different cancers, for instance, TCGA produced over 2.5 petabytes of big data. Furthermore, the big data produced by these mega projects has been made publicly available to the clinicians and researchers to fast-track the diagnosis and prognosis of complex rare diseases. In developed countries, a multi-omics approach has been applied holistically to the clinical practice for the diagnosis and prognosis of various cancers and rare Mendelian diseases.