Populomics:Beyond new applications and technologies to new perspectives in Public Health and Disparities research

Comprehensively understanding health and treating disease requires integrating knowledge regarding determinants which exist across several levels of analysis (molecular, cellular, clinico-behavioral, neighborhood/community, cultural and societal). Historically, science has focused primarily on single level clinical, cellular or molecular mechanistic analyses. While this approach has enabled significant advances, the rise in global health concerns generally, the increasing recognition of the importance of socioenvironmental and cultural determinants of health and the inability to reduce or eliminate disparities in health outcomes all highlight the limitations of this individualized approach to health and disease. In the future, clinical, cellular, genetic and epigenetic determinants of disease will need to be understood within the context of broader determinants which operate primarily at the group and population level. Increased reliance on HIT applications will undoubtedly be needed to accomplish this goal. This reliance on HIT, may in addition, enable the development of whole new forms of practice and research. Populomics is emerging as a novel transdisciplinary approach to scientific investigation that is built on an HIT foundation to integrate knowledge across individual and population levels to yield novel insights on health, disease causation and therapeutics particularly at the population level. This presentation will discuss the conceptual and theoretic origins and future potential of Populomics for Public Health and Disparities research.