‘Multi-omics’ is changing how India spots and treats TB, cancers

Sub: Science and tech

Sec: Biotech

Context:

In January 2024, the Department of Biotechnology said it had completed sequencing 10,000 genomes from 99 ethnic groups under its ‘Genome India’ project.

More on news:

In October 2020, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) had reportedly sequenced the entire genomes of 1,008 individuals in India representing diverse ethnic groups in six months.
This effort was part of a mission called ‘IndiGen’ aimed to create a pilot dataset with which researchers could analyze the epidemiology of genetic diseases and help develop affordable screening approaches, optimize treatment, and minimize adverse events for them.
Researchers have also been able to extract more value from these using artificial intelligence and machine learning, and by combining their contents with other extensive datasets on proteins (proteomics), gene expression in cells (transcriptomics), and chemical changes that regulate gene expression (epigenomics) to develop a ‘multi-omics’ approach to tackle diseases.

What is the Genome India Project?

Genome India Project is a research initiative led by the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Science’s Centre for Brain Research and involves over 20 universities across the country in an effort to gather samples, compile data, conduct research, and create an ‘Indian reference genome’ grid.
This national initiative aims to develop a reference genome for Indian people, which will help design genome-wide and disease-specific ‘genetic chips’ for low-cost diagnostics and research.

What are Multiomics?

Multi Omics is a new approach where the data sets of different omic groups are combined during analysis.
The different omic strategies employed during multi omics are genome, proteome, transcriptome, epigenome, and microbiome.

Treatment for Tuberculosis:

The Indian Tuberculosis Genomic Surveillance Consortium (InTGS) comprises 10 Report India sites covering eight states for tuberculosis, with the goal of sequencing around 32,000 tuberculosis clinical strains from active patients, and developing a centralized biological repository of clinical Mycobacterium tuberculosis strains in India.
Other major objectives vis-à-vis tuberculosis include mapping the genetic diversity of pulmonary and extra-pulmonary isolates of the tuberculosis bacterium from newly reported active cases in India.
The project’s ultimate goal is to validate identified mutations to develop a sequence-based method to determine drug resistance.

Rare genetic disorders:

India has also launched a pan-country mission for Pediatric Rare Genetic Disorders (PRaGeD), which, despite their rarity, have become a common public health concern.
Mission PRaGeD is planning to create awareness, perform genetic diagnosis, discover and characterize new genes or variants, provide counselling, and develop new therapies for rare genetic diseases that afflict India’s children.
The mission will incorporate IndiGen data in its in-house bioinformatic pipelines it will use to analyze the parts of a genome that code for proteins (exome).

Cancers:

Several Indian institutions have established the ICGC-like genomic data repositories to facilitate cancer research and precision medicine initiatives that cater to the genetic makeup of Indian people.
Indian Cancer Genome Atlas project, a not-for-profit public-private-philanthropic initiative that is trying to create a comprehensive catalog of genomic alterations across various cancer types prevalent in India.

Antimicrobial resistance:

Genomics and metagenomics are coming in handy to analyze antimicrobial resistance and understand the possibility of rapid spread of any antibiotic resistance functions between bacterial species.

AI, ML, and multi-omics:

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms are lending a helping hand to genomics in analyzing the extensive datasets.
Multiomics (multiple ‘omics) provides a more complete way to understand the contribution of genetic variants to biology, disease and their mechanism of action.