City among phenome research leaders

Shanghai, Seattle and Tel Aviv have become the world's three major centers for human phenome research, which may provide new insights into the analysis of major diseases, said a top scientist in the field.

A phenome is the set of all traits expressed by an organism, cell, tissue or organ.

The three cities are clearly the leaders in the human phenome initiative and each of them employs different technologies to make measurements on human beings, said Leroy Hood, co-founder of the Human Phenome Initiative and member of four national academies in the United States, during a visit to Shanghai on Monday.

The initiative is a large international project in life sciences. Scholars, including Hood and Jin Li, president of Fudan University in Shanghai, launched the plan in 2018. It is expected to play an important role in promoting the development of precision medicine, improving the accuracy of disease diagnosis, promoting the research and development of new drugs, and analyzing the history of human evolution.

According to Hood, who is also a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China is a place of innovation with a growing number of innovative enterprises, and Shanghai has become one of the centers globally for biomedical research and development.

"Chinese scientists have taken the lead in research on human phenotypes and genomes. I look forward to more collaborations and joint research in the future," he said.

He made a keynote speech titled "The Human Phenome Initiative: Transforming Healthcare from a Disease-Driven to a Wellness and Prevention Orientation "at the Shanghai Master Forum on Science held at Fudan University.

Each of the three centers has a unique, integrated vision of where they want to go and is adding different technologies, both from the measurement side and data analysis side, said Hood, who is also a laureate of the Lasker Prize and the National Medal of Science in the US.

"What the Chinese scientists are doing is to create a phenotype database based on more than 1,000 individuals with many different kinds of measurement, including imaging, blood and a lot of neurologic data," he said.

Hood said the Israeli team has created the largest database of 12,000 individuals and they have gone deeply into diet and gut microbiome, and the Seattle team has been focusing on the biomedical aspects, and wellness and disease prevention in particular.

"So I think the three together will be enormously complementary and effective if we can create relationships that are meaningful," said Hood.