On Feb. 14, 2018, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, (PNNL) and Oregon Health & Science University OHSU announced the creation of the OHSU-PNNL Precision Medicine Innovation Co-Laboratory (PMedIC).

PMedIC, will provide a comprehensive ecosystem for scientists to utilize integrated ‘omics, data science and imaging technologies in their research in order to advance precision medicine — an approach to disease treatment that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person.

The co-laboratory will strengthen and expand the scope of existing interactions between OHSU and PNNL that already include cancer, regulation of the cardiovascular function, immunology and infection, and brain function, and add new collaborations in areas from metabolism to exposure science. The collaboration brings together the two institution’s strengths in data science, imaging and integrated ‘omics, which explores how genes, proteins and various metabolic products interact. The term arises from research that explores the function of key biological components within the context of the entire cell — genomics for genes, proteomics for proteins, and so on.

In the long term, OHSU and PNNL aim to foster a generation of biomedical researchers fluent in all the aspects of the science underlying precision medicine, from clinical trials to molecular and computational biology to bioengineering and technology development — a new generation of scientists skilled in translating basic science discoveries to clinical care.

OHSU and PNNL first collaborated in 2015, when they formed the OHSU-PNNL Northwest Co-Laboratory for Integrated ‘Omics and were designated a national Metabolomics Center for the Undiagnosed Disease Network, an NIH-funded national network designed to identify underlying mechanisms of very rare diseases. In 2017, the two organizations partnered on a National Cancer Institute-sponsored effort to become a Proteogenomic Translational Research Center focused on a complex form of leukemia.