The era of the personal genome has arrived, but the dream of precision medicine based on a personalized understanding of disease etiology and dynamic response to treatment remains distant. Large consortia such as Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) and Roadmap Epigenomic projects have provided important knowledge of the regulatory landscape of the human genome. But a deep technological chasm exists between the knowledge from abundant cell sources in laboratory settings versus the inability to learn regulatory landscapes of diseases from miniscule clinical samples in individual patients. In short, it has become clear that a personalized genome is not sufficient for personalized medicine. Instead, a personalized understanding of the regulatory landscape of disease is required for informed interventions. The Center for Personal Dynamic Regulomes aims to leap beyond current approaches by developing methods, interpretive frameworks, and foundational data that will enable the creation and interpretation of personal regulomes in the clinic.

Our vision is to create the “GPS system” for navigating the regulomic landscape for human health and disease. 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. Comprehensive maps of putative gene regulatory regions and structural variation have been generated for multiple human cell types (e.g. ENCODE, Epigenomic Roadmap, 1000 Genome projects). Yet a very distinct and complementary need from the creation of comprehensive maps is the capacity to navigate the maps. We need technologies to determine rapidly how the epigenomic state 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.

If successful, these technologies will enable:

1. Paradigms for regulome discovery across all of biomedicine
2. Purposeful navigation in heath and disease in both diagnosis and therapy