BIO 2025: Unlocking Cellular Secrets with Multi-Omics
Prior to BIO 2025, The Pharma Navigator sits down with Juozas Gordevičius from VUGENE, to learn more about multi-omics and its potential in advancing future drug development.
“Multi-omics is a way of looking into the processes that are happening inside the cell at different layers,” remarks Juozas Gordevičius, founder and CTO of VUGENE — a biomedical data science company. “So, imagine that DNA is a single layer, then the epigenomic, the DNA modifications, and histone modifications are another layer, the transcription happening in the cell is one more layer, and then the proteomics, metabolomics are different layers that are all happening inside the cell. Multi-omics is looking into all of those layers, or at least a few of them, simultaneously.”
This ability to view the different layers at the same time is beneficial as it enables oversight into how a signal travels between the different layers and also, how that signal potentially breaks down or is changed as a result of disease, Gordevičius notes. “Therefore, we can target those relationships between the layers and create new types of drugs and treatment strategies,” he says.
While the amount of data gained when using tools such as multi-omics is commonly thought of as a challenge, nowadays there are many solutions available to overcome this issue, such as cloud systems or computational engineering solutions, Gordevičius continues. “The bigger problem nowadays is the lack of samples,” he emphasizes. “You can have an experiment with 100 samples, but it is still not enough if you are measuring millions and millions of different things that are happening across one single cell.”
An integration approach to experiments will help to overcome the challenge of limited samples, Gordevičius stresses. “The solution is to integrate your experiment with other publicly available data,” he says. “To use AI [artificial intelligence] foundational models to increase scope of your data, which allows you to gain new insights from experiments that are quite limited in size or in the number of samples.”
Click the video above to view the full interview
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