‘Multi-omics’ Approach to Tackle Diseases

Context

Recent developments in ‘multi-omics’ approaches have significantly enhanced the diagnosis and treatment of diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and cancers in India. 

About

• Efforts are underway to create new datasets to address individual health problems, ranging from the age-old scourge of tuberculosis to cancers, uncommon genetic problems in youth, and even antimicrobial resistance.
  •  Researchers have also been able to extract extra value from those using artificial intelligence and device gaining knowledge of, and by combining their contents with different significant datasets on proteins (proteomics), gene expression in cells (transcriptomics), and chemical modifications that regulate gene expression (epigenomics) to expand a ‘multi-omics’ technique to address diseases.

Disease-Specific Efforts 

• Tuberculosis: The Indian Tuberculosis Genomic Surveillance Consortium (InTGS) contains 10 Report India sites protecting 8 states for tuberculosis, with the aim of sequencing around 32,000 tuberculosis medical strains from lively sufferers, and increase a centralised biological repository of scientific Mycobacterium tuberculosis lines in India.
  • Goals encompass mapping genetic variety, correlating mutations with drug resistance, and optimising remedy consequences.
• Rare genetic disorders : India has also released a pan-united states of america venture for Pediatric Rare Genetic Disorders (PRaGeD)
  • Mission PRaGeD is planning to create consciousness, perform genetic diagnosis, find out and characterise new genes or variants, offer counseling, and increase new therapies for rare genetic diseases that afflict India’s children.
  • Focuses on genetic diagnosis, new gene discovery, and remedy improvement for pediatric uncommon genetic diseases.
  • Integrates statistics from IndiGen to beautify genetic analysis and management.
• Cancers: The Indian Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC-India), a part of the bigger International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) and supported by way of the Department of Biotechnology, plans to characterise genomic abnormalities in one of a kind forms of cancers in Indian patients and discover population-particular genetic versions which might be related to cancer chance and treatment response.
  • Aims to become aware of biomarkers, treatment targets, and customize treatment strategies through population-huge genome sequencing.
  • The Indian Cancer Genome Atlas task, a not-for-profit public-private-philanthropic initiative, is trying to create a comprehensive catalogue of genomic alterations across various cancers frequent in India. 
• Antimicrobial Resistance: Genomics and metagenomics used to research antimicrobial resistance, specially in sluggish-developing microbes like tuberculosis.
  • Facilitates targeted antibiotic treatment plans by figuring out resistance profiles without the want for lab culturing.

Importance 

• AI and ML algorithms help in analysing significant genomic datasets for predicting disorder dangers, early cancer detection, and treatment stratification.
• Multi-omics method integrates genomics with proteomics, transcriptomics, and epigenomics to enhance sickness expertise and healing improvement.
• With the rapid expansion of AI, it is now easy to access multi-omics and analyse Big Data products rapidly, even with only standard computational facilities  and multi-omics is today an emerging technology in the field of clinical science in India.

Source: The Hindu

UPSC Mains Practice Question

Q. How ‘multi-omics’ approaches have significantly enhanced the diagnosis and treatment of diseases like tuberculosis (TB)? (250 words)

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