Multi-Omics Profiling for Health

The world has witnessed a steady rise in both non-infectious and infectious chronic diseases, prompting a cross-disciplinary approach to understand and treating disease. Current medical care focuses on treating people after they become patients rather than preventing illness, leading to high costs in treating chronic and late-stage diseases. Additionally, a "one-size-fits all" approach to health care does not take into account individual differences in genetics, environment, or lifestyle factors, decreasing the number of people benefiting from interventions. Rapid advances in omics technologies and progress in computational capabilities have led to the development of multi-omics deep phenotyping, which profiles the interaction of multiple levels of biology over time and empowers precision health approaches. This review highlights current and emerging multi-omics modalities for precision health and discusses applications in the following areas: genetic variation, cardio-metabolic diseases, cancer, infectious diseases, organ transplantation, pregnancy, and longevity/aging. We will briefly discuss the potential of multi-omics approaches in disentangling host-microbe and host-environmental interactions. We will touch on emerging areas of electronic health record and clinical imaging integration with muti-omics for precision health. Finally, we will briefly discuss the challenges in the clinical implementation of multi-omics and its future prospects.