NIH Will Allocate $50.3 Million to Multi-Omics Research Over 5 Years

On September 12, 2023, the National Institute of Health (NIH) announced it would award $50.3 million to multi-omics research on health and diseases over the next five years. By establishing the Multi-Omics for Health and Disease Consortium, the organization hopes to continue advancing human health research. The consortium was granted approximately $11 million for its first year of funding.

According to Illumina, multi-omics is a comprehensive biological analysis that combines genomics, metabolomics, transcriptomics, epigenetics, and proteomics. Each of these focus areas provides some insight into biological systems.

“Beyond gaining insights into individual diseases, the primary goal of this consortium is to develop scalable and generalizable multi-omics research strategies as well as methods to analyze these large and complex datasets,” said Joannella Morales, PhD, a National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) program director involved in leading the consortium, in the NIH press release.

“We expect these strategies will ultimately be adopted by other research groups, ensuring the consortium’s work will have broad and long-lasting impacts for clinical research.”

Illumina estimates that 66% of life sciences research incorporates multi-omics. In addition, 25% of researchers plan to integrate multi-omics into their studies within the following year.

In addition to those statistics, Illumina notes that multi-omics grant funding has increased an average of 48% year-over-year since 2012, leading to a 51% annual increase in multi-omics publications since 2012.

“Multi-omics studies are at the forefront of biomedical research and promise to advance our understanding of disease onset and progression,” added Erin Ramos, PhD, MPH, deputy director of NHGRI’s Division of Genomic Medicine. “All while potentially providing important clues for treatment design and drug-discovery efforts. This new consortium is an important step in making those advances a reality.”

The grant will contribute to research by six principal investigators in sites across the world, including the following:

• University of California San Diego
• Columbia University
• University of California San Francisco
• University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine
• Tulane University
• University of Texas Health Science Center

The omics production center will be at Washington University and led by Gary J. Patti, PhD. Finally, the data analysis and coordinating center will be conducted by Zhiping Weng, PhD, at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.