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Showing posts from September, 2016

Why cross-species phenomics informatics is critical to the PMI

Genomics, electronic health records, participant-provided data, sensors, and mobile health technologies can all contribute to personalized medicine. However, we currently cannot achieve statistical correlations amongst these almost unlimited number of parameters that will be collected by the PMI and the depth of mechanistic understanding that will be required for treatment stratification and the development of novel, targeted therapies. The promise of personalized medicine requires deep knowledge of the relationships between genotype, phenotype, and environmental variables - but we simply don’t have enough data. For example, in the ExAC database there are 3,230 genes with near-complete depletion of predicted protein-truncating variants, where 72% of these genes having no currently established human disease phenotype. If we look across organisms, we see that of these 2311 genes with unknown causal phenotypes/diseases, 88% have an associated phenotype in an ortholog, with 56% having or