Pillars and programs
Mayo Clinic Center for Individualized Medicine is a global leader in precision medicine research, practice and education, dedicated to accelerating discoveries and unlocking the secrets of disease. Through the center's leadership in personalizing medicine to transform healthcare, all patients will soon have access to genome sequencing and multi-omic solutions when needed, as well as therapeutics tailored to their unique genomes for hard-to-treat cancers and rare diseases.
Pillars
The Center for Individualized Medicine aligns its programs across four distinct but complementary pillars:
- Functional Omics.
- Digital Omics.
- Population Omics.
- Rare Disease Omics.
Each pillar brings together experts from various medical specialties with advanced artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to investigate vast omics datasets. Some of these include:
- Genomics — the study of genes.
- Proteomics — the study of proteins.
- Exposomics — the study of environmental exposures.
- Metabolomics — the study of metabolic processes.
- Transcriptomics — the study of RNA transcripts.
Omics research offers transformative possibilities for predicting and diagnosing conditions such as chronic diseases, aging, inflammatory conditions and cancer, while also enabling the development of personalized treatments tailored to an individual's unique biological characteristics.
The center's innovative omics strategy, powered by AI and structured around key pillars, is expected to enhance disease diagnosis, prognosis and treatment. This approach is already providing a framework for scalable approaches to serve the individual needs of patients.
Functional Omics
The Functional Omics pillar streamlines research by developing new models to speed the pace of scientific discovery. Key elements of this pillar include the creation of specialized labs for cultivating cell lines and advancing technologies such as epigenetics and single-cell RNA sequencing. These technologies are important for studying the mechanisms of gene activation and deactivation, as well as analyzing the functions of individual cells. Additionally, this pillar investigates microorganisms with potential therapeutic benefits, validates strategies for gene therapy and analyzes biological age and indicators of patient frailty.
Digital Omics
The Digital Omics pillar makes genomic data more accessible and actionable for healthcare providers by integrating it directly into medical records. In partnership with Mayo Clinic leaders, the pillar is establishing data governance structures and standardized definitions for omics data across the organization. By providing easier access to multi-omics data, the pillar aims to reduce research obstacles and foster innovation.
The Digital Omics pillar includes the Center for Individualized Medicine's Omics Data Platform. The purpose of this platform is to centralize staggering amounts of genomic and multi-omic data into a single repository and then leverage the system and associated tools to make the data and corresponding knowledge easily accessible and helpful to Mayo Clinic's physicians and researchers.
Researchers supporting the Omics Data Platform develop and refine strategies and tools to capture and align these assets in ways that enable easy access for everyday use in precision medicine patient care and research. Omics Data Platform teams partner with groups in other focus areas to deliver data for the clinical practice and align with institutional priorities for clinical data analytics, advanced diagnostics and novel therapeutics.
The platform's data scientists collaborate with other organizations to generate test results and knowledge assets, including integrated multi-omic analytics and advanced interpretation tools powered by artificial intelligence.
Eric W. Klee, Ph.D., the center's Everett J. and Jane M. Hauck Midwest Associate Director of Research and Innovation, leads the Functional Omics and Digital Omics pillars.
Rare Disease Omics
In the Rare Disease Omics pillar, researchers and clinicians are improving clinical diagnoses in departments across the institution through multi-omic testing. They are developing a discovery framework to accelerate the development of new therapies for people with rare diseases — defined as conditions affecting fewer than 200,000 people. Altogether there are more than 7,000 known rare diseases affecting an estimated 25 million to 30 million people in the U.S. The pillar is developing AI algorithms to identify Mayo Clinic patients within family and general medicine who might benefit from genetic testing, with the goal of enhancing diagnostic accuracies and guiding individualized treatments.
Timothy B. Curry, M.D., Ph.D., the center's William O. Lund, Jr., and Natalie C. Lund Program Director for Clinomics and associate director of practice implementation, leads the Rare Disease Omics pillar.
Population Omics
The Population Omics pillar aims to make genomic testing universally accessible and integrated into patient care, particularly focusing on actionable genetic variants for various diseases. Additionally, this pillar is integrating polygenic risk scores into clinical screenings, which assess a person's genetic predisposition to certain diseases based on multiple genetic variations. A key focus is on advancing the understanding of multi-omics, including how environmental exposures, combined with genetic factors, influence disease and response to treatments.
Konstantinos N. Lazaridis, M.D., the Carlson and Nelson Endowed Executive Director of the Center for Individualized Medicine, leads the Population Omics pillar.
Programs
Epigenomics Program
The Epigenomics Program examines factors outside of DNA that can change the DNA structure or influence how genes are expressed. These factors include proteins near the DNA helix and environmental factors such as diet; lifestyle; and exposure to pollution, chemicals or radiation. Characterizing these factors and their effects may help patients reduce risk factors for disease and allow scientists to pinpoint new molecular targets for diagnosis and therapy.
Microbiomics Program
The Microbiomics Program studies how the naturally occurring bacteria populations in each person's body help maintain health and how disrupting these bacteria can lead to health problems. Researchers are finding ways to manipulate the microbiome to treat diseases and conditions such as colon cancer, Clostridium difficile infection and irritable bowel syndrome.
Pharmacogenomics Program
The Pharmacogenomics Program studies how specific drugs react with patients' genes to identify the right medicine for the right person at the right time and dose. Researchers translate discoveries into patient care by embedding drug-gene best-practice alerts in the electronic health record and using drug-gene testing in clinical treatment studies for breast cancer, prostate cancer and coronary artery disease.
Infrastructure and support
The Center for Individualized Medicine provides technical resources, expertise and services that ensure the most recent information and processes are available to all medical providers, whether they're treating patients at Mayo Clinic or worldwide.
Bioethics Program
The Bioethics Program develops strategies for integrating genomic technologies into healthcare while always prioritizing the patient's best interests. Program activities include providing ethics consultations and education, supporting community advisory boards, engaging the larger community, and providing national leadership on ethical issues in genomic medicine.
Bioinformatics Program
The Bioinformatics Program supports individualized medicine research by taking "raw" genomic sequencing data and processing, analyzing and interpreting it, ultimately leading to personalized tests and treatments for patients.
Clinomics Program
The Clinomics Program accelerates the translation of discoveries from the research lab to patient care by integrating genomic data into clinical systems and creating new tools that enable doctors to access, visualize and use genomic information. Clinicians and scientists collaborate with multidisciplinary experts to advance healthcare for cancer, rare and undiagnosed diseases, and predictive testing.
Education Program
The Center for Individualized Medicine educates care teams, researchers, patients and communities about how genomic information is used to improve healthcare. The program helps build the precision medicine workforce of the future by training current and future healthcare team members to become expert providers of world-class individualized patient care.
Information Technology Program
The Information Technology Program provides resources to support the center's next-generation sequencing, including high-speed servers for identifying genomic variants and storing millions of gigabytes of data. The program also develops applications for validating and optimizing new laboratory tests and managing clinical trials.
Translational Omics Program
The Translational Omics Program analyzes multiple types of omic data to interpret genetic testing results and apply findings to patient care. Test results give researchers critical information about the possible causes of previously undiagnosed diseases and help identify new treatment strategies to improve patient care.