A Multi-omics Approach to Disease Interviews with Johanna Assadi Rissanen Project Coordinator In the latest years drug development has started to go from a “one size fits all”-approach to more targeted medical inventions: precision medicine. Multi-omics is a dynamic and crucial step when it comes to delivering modern, personalized precision medicine. In the session A Multi-omics Approach to Disease at Nordic Life Science Days, moderator Lisa Melton, Senior News Editor at Nature Biotechnology, together with experts in the field will investigate the current explorations of multi-omics across the Nordics as well as discussing the role -omics has to play a role in life sciences today and in the future. The session is appropriately hosted by Iceland, the country with a unique gene-bank that has enabled extensive research within the field. Disease is complex and at each disease stage there can be multiple underlying processes. The integration of multi-omics, such as proteomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, metabolomics, microbiomics and genomics, is needed to capture the multidimensional information from diverse data types to reveal more complete molecular mechanisms of disease. The omics-field has enabled the discovery of new biomarkers as well as better understanding of disease progression and drug resistance. -Omics is routinely used in early stages of disease to help with target/pathway identification, model validation and hypothesis generation. Dr. Margrét Þorsteinsdóttir, professor at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Iceland, and the R&D director of ArcticMass, says: “Proteomics has shown to be important for early disease diagnosis, prognosis and monitoring of disease development and thus provides a unique opportunity for development of new preventive and therapeutic strategies”. Dr. Þorsteinsdóttir also emphasizes that better access for clinicians is needed, as well as a comprehensive comparison of data across clinical laboratories to take full advantages of these techniques. Integration of data from multi-omics modalities can be instrumental across the pharmaceutical pipeline. In addition, integrating proteomics research with genomic information has been proven to accelerate the development of more successful and effective medicines, says Dr. Ida Grundberg, Chief Scientific Officer at Olink. The aim is to better understand biology in real-time, identify disease signals that our body sends out, and also to find promising drug targets that could lead to safer and more effective therapy for next-generation medicine. Through better understanding of our proteome and how it’s affected in different life stages, we make significant improvements within prediction and prevention of disease. “Within applied medical research, scientists want to identify robust protein signatures to identify diseases at an earlier stage, classify diseases and patients into correct subtypes and predict treatment outcome. Also, during the last years, we see a strong trend to integrate proteomic data with other omics, mainly genomics, to further demystify health and disease,” Dr. Grundberg says. Already today there is unprecedented level of resolution in terms of single cell tissue atlases, access to large scale reverse genetics data like CRISPR and large volumes of omics data in general. Looking into the future, this in combination with democratization of machine learning approaches, which allow to learn from this data, creates potential for generating hypothesis and novel programs. Dr. Victor Neduva, Senior Director Discovery Research at MSD, says: “In the area of multi-omics and data analysis, artificial intelligence and machine learning is definitely a very popular trend. Single cell continues being popular with new approaches like spatial omics starting to be utilized, although it is still at a very early stage. Integration of multi-omics data with clinical endpoints and longitudinal data is also very promising for finding targets and markers of disease progression.” Thank you so much and see you in Malmö! Super Session 4 29 September 2022 A Multi-omics Approach to Disease