NEW YORK – Mayo Clinic on Thursday unveiled a four-pronged omics strategy for integrating precision medicine into clinical practice at the Rochester, Minnesota-based hospital system and spur development of targeted treatments and preventive health efforts.
The program, spearheaded by Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine, will have four pillars: rare disease omics, population omics, functional omics, and digital omics. Within the program, researchers will apply advanced artificial intelligence and analytics to study datasets and incorporate genomics, proteomics, exposomics, metabolomics, and transcriptomics.
Under the rare disease omics pillar, researchers and clinicians will use multiomic testing to support clinical diagnosis, develop AI algorithms to identify patients who might benefit from genetic testing, and create a framework to accelerate therapeutic development. For population omics, Mayo Clinic aims to make genomic testing broadly accessible within patient care, integrate polygenic risk scores into clinical screenings, and investigate how environmental exposures combined with genetics influence disease and treatment response.
Within the functional omics category, the hospital system will establish specialized labs for cultivating cell lines and advancing new molecular technologies that streamline omics research, as well as study microorganisms with possible therapeutic benefits.
Lastly, for digital omics, researchers will work to digitize genomic data and make it available to clinicians within Mayo's electronic health record system. Additionally, Mayo will establish data governance structures and standardize how omics data is presented in the EHR.
"This new strategy represents a monumental leap into a new era of medical science," Konstantinos Lazaridis, executive director for Mayo Clinic's Center for Individualized Medicine, said in a statement. "These four interconnected 'omics' pillars will help us magnify our impact, drive advancements in individualized medicine, and redefine patient care."