How to build personalized multi-omics comorbidity profiles

Mohammad Ali Moni, Pietro Liò

Multiple diseases (acute or chronic events) occur together in a patient, which refers to the disease comorbidities, because of the multi ways associations among diseases. Due to shared genetic, molecular, environmental, and lifestyle-based risk factors, many diseases are comorbid in the same patient. Methods for integrating multiple types of omics data play an important role to identify integrative biomarkers for stratification of patients into groups with different clinical outcomes. Moreover, integrated omics and clinical information may potentially improve prediction accuracy of disease comorbidities. However, there is a lack of effective and efficient bioinformatics and statistical software for true integrative data analysis. With the availability of the wide spread huge omics, phenotype and ontology information, it is becoming more and more practical to help doctors in clinical diagnostics and comorbidity prediction by providing appropriate software tool. We developed an R software POGO to compute novel estimators of the disease comorbidity risks and patient stratification. Starting from an initial diagnosis, omics and clinical data of a patient the software identifies the association risk of disease comorbidities. The input of this software is the initial diagnosis of a patient and the output provides evidence of disease comorbidities. The functions of POGO offer flexibility for diagnostic applications to predict disease comorbidities, and can be easily integrated to high-throughput and clinical data analysis pipelines. POGO is compliant with the Bioconductor standard and it is freely available at www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mam211/POGO/.