JULY 2024LIFE SCIENCES REVIEW8A SINGLE OMIC FALLS SHORT FOR UNDERSTANDING LIFE By Roman Ortega Bianchi, Head Of BD & Commercial Strategy, StämmIN MY OPINIONnderstanding cell state: a single Omic falls short? People thought Genomics would solve everything. All of our diseases, disorders, agricultural challenges, evolutionary quandaries, ecological issues, even death itself. It didn´t. The finalization of the Human Genome Project (HGP) in 2003 after 13 years of research, meant the beginning of a revolution in digital biology. Human genes were now discovered and accessible. That was it, we could know every mutation, insertion, deletion or duplication. The industry brought down the cost of sequencing a whole human genome faster than Moore's law could predict. From hundreds of millions of dollars to approximately six hundred in 2023. The insights obtained by Genomics were fundamental for medical research and healthcare, allowing the development of personalized medicine, cancer genomics, rare genetic disorders, and pharmacogenomics. On the broader picture, its usefulness was proven in agriculture with crop improvement, bolstered nowadays by methods like CRISPR-CAS9. However, several factors that Genomics couldn't explain hampered our understanding of living things. From expression patterns to epigenetic marks, knowing the DNA sequence alone did not provide all the answers. Genomics by itself doesn't tell the cell's complete story. That's why a multiplicity of Omics of interest appeared: Proteomics, Metabolomics, Metagenomics, Phenomics, and Transcriptomics. This is a new opportunity to understand cells like never before. Analyzing multiple Omics at the same time can be the game changer we were looking for with ambitious endeavors like the Human Genome Project. Knowing and modifying DNA rapidly became a fundamental step in biology workflows. Bioengineering progressively became more accessible and cheaper, breaking down the bottleneck it used to be. All these advancements allow us to raise the bar of the game and ask ourselves increasingly complex questions. The development of cell lines for different industries has sped up and reduced its costs, especially for producing genetically modified clones. So, where are the bottlenecks? Understanding biological information in depth, specifically the relationship between phenotypes and ambient conditions. The bottlenecks changed from data generation to data interpretation for decision-making optimization. Today, the main hardship is interpreting multiple Omics simultaneously while considering the environmental interactions that shape the ultimate phenotype. Plus, the insightURoman Ortega Bianchi
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