Multi-“Omics” data is the name of the game now – we’ve entered an era of precision medicine. Genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics are just some of the ways we look at an entire biological system. If you’ve heard about “mapping the genome”, you’ve heard of genomics – whereas we used to look at “one gene” we now look at all of them.
Let’s say you were to start smoking. There are over 70 carcinogenic compounds in cigarette smoke, but the danger of developing cancer from smoking is compounded overtime. You (generally) aren’t going to develop esophageal cancer from trying it one day, but if you continue to smoke, the risk goes up. This is because prolonged cigarette smoke affects genes and proteins associated with preventing esophageal cancer. The damage compounds and eventually, your cellular system isn’t able to protect you as it once did.
You can’t influence your health span without understanding how something affects you at cellular level – and thanks to machine-learning/AI, we can start extrapolating your health span based on all the “omics” data we can gather (and it’s a lot!). At Mikra, we’re focusing on functional genomics – for every product we launch, we look at how it affects you on a cellular level (genomics) by mapping which gene expression pathways are triggered (transcriptomics), positively and negatively. That way, we know that our product is actually affecting you positively at the most microscopic level: your cells. This is why product iterations are so important – the more data we gather, the better we can make our products and increase the world's health span.
