Finding what in your genes, proteins, metabolites, and gut microbes causes disease
Advancing Causal Inference in Integrative Omics Analysis
New computer methods will combine gene, protein, metabolite, and gut microbiome data to help find causes of human diseases.
Quick facts
| Grant type | NIH-funded research |
|---|---|
| Study type | NIH-funded research |
| Funding institution | University of Washington NIH-funded |
| Lab location | 1 site (Seattle, United States) |
| Project ID | NIH-11175500 on NIH RePORTER |
What this research studies
Researchers are building new statistical and machine-learning tools to pull together many types of molecular data—genes, transcripts, proteins, metabolites, and gut microbes—to identify biological pathways that lead to disease. They will broaden mediation analysis to handle many molecular mediators at once using techniques called sufficient dimension reduction and variational autoencoders. The team will apply and test these methods on large omics datasets that include clinical and microbiome samples and will release the tools as open-source software. These tools aim to help separate likely causal signals from mere correlations in complex biological data.
Who could benefit from this research
Good fit: People who donate blood, tissue, stool, or other samples or who join studies that collect genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and microbiome data would be the most relevant participants.
Not a fit: Patients without molecular data collected or those needing immediate treatment changes are unlikely to receive direct or immediate benefit from this methods-focused project.
Why it matters
Potential benefit: If successful, this work could help identify true biological causes of disease and point to better diagnostics or more targeted treatments for patients.
How similar studies have performed: Related statistical and machine-learning approaches have found useful links in omics data, but this joint causal mediation approach is relatively novel and not yet widely tested in patient datasets.
Where this research is happening
Seattle, United States
- University of Washington — Seattle, United States (Active)
Researchers
- Principal investigator: Ye, Ting — University of Washington
- Study coordinator: Ye, Ting
About this research
- This is an active NIH-funded research project — typically early-stage science, not a clinical trial accepting patient enrollment.
- Some NIH-funded labs run parallel clinical studies or seek volunteers for related work. To check, contact the principal investigator or institution listed above.
- For full project details, budget, and progress reports, visit the official NIH RePORTER page below.