Personalizing Clinical Blood Tests

One of our focus areas is the personalized interpretation of clinical blood tests. We are exploring the extent to which deep-phenotyping data — especially genomics — can be used to personalize the interpretation of existing clinical laboratory measurements, ultimately improving their diagnostic accuracy. The integration of these personalized metrics with existing clinical decision-making offers the most straight-forward path to bring deep phenotyping into the clinic. In collaboration with physicians within the Providence St. Joseph Health system, we are using pre-diabetes and its blood markers as a case study to explore how genetic and biochemical mechanisms contribute to interindividual heterogeneity. One of the goals here is to define a baseline for each individual (an ‘N-of-1 approach’) that will allow clinicians to move away from population averages and toward personalized health metrics.

Relevant Recent Publications:

Blood Is a Window into Health and Disease. Yurkovich JT, Hood L. Clin Chem. 2019 Oct;65(10):1204-1206. doi: 10.1373/clinchem.2018.299065. PMID: 31171530

Current Project Leads:

Nathan Price	Leroy Hood