Our vision is to create the “GPS system” for navigating the regulomic landscape of human health and disease. Each gene has a system of switches that controls when and where a gene will turn on. The regulome is the complete set of switches for all genes. Regulated gene expression play key roles in nearly every developmental program and disease state, and dozens of human therapeutics act through this regulation to alter gene expression. We aim for technologies to determine rapidly how the regulomes of individual patients and disease tissues maps onto the global landscape, and how each therapeutic intervention changes their trajectories in real time. This real time information feedback between perturbation and outcome is essential to tailor precise medical treatments for individual patients. Moreover, these new technologies must be compatible with the small sample sizes of human biopsies and clinical workflows if they are to be widely adopted. Hence, current methods need to be improved by orders of magnitude in input requirement, speed, and cost, while simultaneously made more simple and robust to be amenable for personalized medicine. Realization of this vision will allow the broad biomedical community to extract far greater value from rapidly growing catalogs of genomes and epigenomes, and begin to transform the practice of medicine.

The Center for Personal Dynamic Regulome at Stanford University is a Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS), a program established by the National Human Genome Research Institute for multi-investigator, interdisciplinary research that develops highly innovative genomics research projects.