Unravelling disease complexity: integrative analysis of multi-omic data in clinical research

INTRODUCTION: A holistic view on biological systems is today a reality with the application of multi-omic technologies. These technologies allow the profiling of genome, epigenome, transcriptome, proteome, metabolome as well as newly emerging 'omes.' While the multiple layers of data accumulate, their integration and reconciliation in a single system map is a cumbersome exercise that faces many challenges. Application to human health and disease requires large sample sizes, robust methodologies and high-quality standards. AREAS COVERED: We review the different methods used to integrate multi-omics, as recent ones including artificial intelligence. With proteomics as an anchor technology, we then present selected applications of its data combination with other omics layers in clinical research, mainly covering literature from the last five years in the Scopus and/or PubMed databases. EXPERT OPINION: Multi-omics is powerful to comprehensively type molecular layers and link them to phenotype. Yet, technologies and data are very diverse and still strategies and methodologies to properly integrate these modalities are needed.