Leveraging Multi-omics Approaches to Understand and Manage Gastrointestinal and Hepatic Diseases

Digestive diseases including diseases of the gastrointestinal (GI) tract, pancreas and the liver cause severe morbidity, disability, and premature deaths. Successful treatment and management of these diseases requires understanding of risk factors that are unique to the individual affected by the disease. Personalized medicine is expected to overcome challenges in diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of GI and liver diseases. Personalized medicine relies on integrating environmental and lifestyle factors with patients’ gene expression and consequent biomolecular changes to provide tailored treatment to a specific individual.

The combination and integration of multiple omics (i.e., genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics) is at the heart of personalized medicine as multi-omics is indispensable in decoding heterogeneity of human diseases to enable tailored treatment methods. Combatting and finding solutions for GI and hepatic diseases, such as cirrhosis, viral hepatitis, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcerative colitis, is essential and current big data research of cohort studies that leverages metabolomics, proteomics, transcriptomics and genomics studies are enabling this to happen more easily and at a faster pace.

The aim of this Research Topic is to highlight recent developments of personalized medicine in gastrointestinal and hepatic diseases with a focus on the utilization of multi-omics approaches. We will consider reviews, full research articles for inclusion in this Research Topic.

Keywords: metabolomics, proteomics, gastrointestinal disease, hepatic disease

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