The concept of omics may still leave most people baffled, but for science communities, this hugely promising approach to biolomedical research is already 25 years old and ignorance could be costly.
Skolkovo, for its part, is taking no chances.
The Hypercube this week hosted the first in what Skolkovo hopes will be a series of seminars on the penetration of omics methodologies in Russian science and its budding life sciences industry.
A DNA profile. Photo: Flickr
Omics is an umbrella term for fields of biology dealing with experimental “big data," namely genomics (genome re-sequencing and genotyping), proteomics, and metabolomics, and others with that suffix.
For a basic grasp it is enough to know that omics analyzes biological processes and systems as a whole, rather than each protein or gene individually.
For example, genomics aggregates the data from the entire DNA content in the cell, proteomics studies all the proteins together, and metabolomics accounts for all metabolites in a sample.
What the aggregated data tell scientists is often more useful than what is yielded by individual snippets, because the gene and protein interactions are taken into account, allowing for higher-accuracy analysis and prediction of biologically relevant phenomena such as diseases or drug response.
“People were studying single genes, or single proteins, or interaction of a single gene with a single protein, and this reductionist paradigm has its limitations,” said Mikhail Gelfand, one of Russia’s most prominent bioinformaticians. “This was widely discussed by biologists at the end of the last century,” he said.
“But now we can look at a cell as a whole: not individual proteins but all proteins in a cell simultaneously. What changes with all genes when you heat a cell, or freeze a cell, or add salt, or whatever. Or it becomes cancerous. This is actually what omics is doing,” he said.
When all the omics fields are analyzed in a person collectively, an integrative personal omics profile (known as IPOP) can be built. Such a comprehensive data set has massive potential for the healthcare industry, as early research has shown it can predict predispositions to conditions and diseases in humans.
Skolkovo is playing chaperone to omics-oriented startups as they enter a relatively new territory in Russia and the CIS.
Mikhail Gelfand speaking on the challenges of conducting omics research in Russia. Photo: sk.ru
In October, the first Skolkovo Almanac featured the topic prominently. Now, Skolkovo has begun gathering the top minds in Russia on the subject and hopes to play a major role in advancing the understanding and applications of omics in general.
The seminar at the Hypercube exhibited a smattering of companies engaged in omics, in one way or another.
Anton Bragin of the St. Petersburg-based Parseq Lab, which develops applications for molecular genetics for improved personalized medicine, discussed ways in which omics data is stored and analyzed.
Sergey Musinenko, CEO and co-founder of Atlas, a consumer genomics company based in Moscow, described the scope and status of population genotyping and discussed advantages and limitations of these popular consumer-oriented services.
Dmitry Alexeev of the Moscow Institute for Physics and Chemistry presented the omics approach to studying the microbiome, a term that refers to the microorganisms that reside inside the human body, while U.S.-based researcher Tatiana Tatarinova showed the application of omics to understanding human origins and migration as well as biomedical applications at the Los Angeles Children’s Hospital.
On the sidelines of Tuesday’s seminar, Gelfand, as a leading authority on the subject, was asked why omics is of particular importance to Russia.
“This field of research is important, period. And Russia is no exception. There are no specifics in Russia in that respect,” he said.
“But if Russia wants to follow the trend, or eventually lead the trend, it’s clear now that omics biology is the thing to do. “
Skolkovo’s Yury Nikolsky, the biomedical cluster’s director of science, stresses that omics is starting to define contemporary biological research.
Skolkovo's Yuri Nikolsky. Photo: sk.ru
“Omics technology, although it has been around for 20 or 25 years, provides the foundation of what is being done in modern biomedicine,” he says.
“If we talk of modern analyses in biomedicine, about the development of medicine, omics technology is playing a bigger and bigger role,” Nikolsky says. “That’s why omics is so interesting for us as an innovation funding agency”
Omics advocates guard against excessive eulogizing, however, wary of overselling it as a solution to all of life’s ills.
“I am really concerned about oversell,” says Gelfand. “That we promise too much. This happened with the human genome project, for instance. It was great, it completely transformed science, that area. But people had to sell it under the guise of curing cancer. And this obviously didn’t happen.”
“Again, there is huge progress in curing cancer, and knowing the genome helps with that, but it wasn’t like the thing. It’s the same now. We’re talking about personalized medicine. It’s a great area, it’s very interesting science, but we shouldn’t oversell it.”
The potential applications of omics in the pharmaceuticals industry is an area where particular caution is needed, as past experience has shown, says Nikolsky.
“It was oversold due to the market evaluation of all these technologies,” he said. “In 2000, all these companies that were involved in omics technologies and bio-informatics took off and soared, but then they fell back down to Earth just as fast,” he said. “That’s the way the speculative market in built around medical technology as a whole.”
“Most people, most investors, don’t understand what they’re getting into, so this is the behavior you get.”
Nikolsky recalled a Massachusetts-based company achieved a market capitalization in excess of $20 billion on the back of deals it struck with pharmaceutical majors to provide omics support to their research and development efforts.
“But absolutely nothing happened. Research in the field of creating medicine is very complex and time-consuming. No technology can dramatically speed up the process of clinical trials, which is the most expensive and difficult part,” he said.
“It all takes time. New medicines are created over 10-15 years.”
That said, omics is already a game-changer in the way it allows genome sequencing to be used in the clinic, Nikolsky noted. When prescribing medicine or treatment, physicians can predict the potency of side-effects by examining a patient’s DNA. Only a complete DNA record makes this possible.
But it is not the final application that excites Gelfand, rather the process of conducting new kinds of science, which can unlock doors in research that no-one even knew existed.
“My motivation as a scientist is not in application. It is rather in biology per se,” he said.
“All interesting science eventually leads to useful stuff. It might be medicine, it might be biotech, it might be, I don’t know, humans growing gills and being able to swim indefinitely underwater,” Gelfand says.
“This road from science to application in biology is becoming really short. We don’t know when and what particular method or whatever observation will be used, but as field itself, it’s proving its worth in an extremely fast way.”