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Table 2 Using "-omics": advantages and limitations

From: The impact of new research technologies on our understanding of environmental causes of disease: the concept of clinical vulnerability

Advantages

Use in large, hypothesis-free investigations of the whole complement of relevant biological molecules.

 

Better understanding of phenotype-genotype relations.

 

May provide insights into the impact of interactions between environmental conditions and genotypes, and mechanistic insights into disease aetiology.

Limitations

Limitations arising from cost of assays, quality of biological material available (e.g. instability of RNAs), and the amount of labour needed.

 

Techniques still in their discovery state and new leads need to be carefully investigated and compared to existing biological information from in vivo and in vitro tests.

 

New leads in the discovery of novel intermediate markers need to be confirmed in other independent studies preferably using different platforms.

 

It is important to bear in mind that moving from promising techniques to successful application of biomarkers in occupational and environmental medicine requires not only the standardization and validation of techniques, but also appropriate study designs and sophisticated statistical analyses for interpretation of study results (i.e. issue of multiple comparisons and false positives).