Jeremy Nicholson
Director, Australian National Phenome Center; Professor of Medicine, Murdoch University, Australia
Main research aims? Elucidating the systemic metabolic signatures of gene-environment-microbiome interactions to discover new diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers and models for disease diagnosis and predictive outcomes in personalized and preventive medicine.
Making personalized medicine a reality… Personalized medicine remains an aspiration and a major challenge in a planetary population of over 8 billion people, but analytical science can help make this a reality for some diseases (such as cancers and cardiovascular disease) in some parts of the world. Preventive medicine and early detection go hand in hand with personalized medicine, and identifying individuals in the population with actionable disease risks – e.g. for cancer and CVD risks is crucial. This requires measuring and modeling human populations at large scale (tens or hundreds of thousands of samples) with multiple analytical technologies (we use NMR spectroscopy and mass spectrometry) and combining those data informatically to discover new predictive risk biomarkers. To do this at scale or in the clinic necessitates the use of readily accessible samples such as urine or plasma which are routinely available diagnostic fluids. This in turn requires highly standardized Phenomic approaches using robust and validated methods (both targeted and exploratory) that can be harmonized across multiple laboratories and countries. Hence the Phenome Centre and Phenome Centre network models that we have created and continue to build to generate such information sets. Changing the face of medicine and enabling personalisation at scale is non-trivial and will come about gradually as multivariate diagnostic modeling and knowledge advances on multiple fronts.
