How the Broad Institute’s GTEx uses a multidisciplinary approach to translate research into medicine

MIT’s new report “Convergence: The Future of Health” states: “Convergence comes as a result of the sharing of methods and ideas by chemists, physicists, computer scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and life scientists across multiple fields and industries. It is the integration of insights and approaches from historically distinct scientific and technological disciplines. Convergence is a broad effort across the sciences that will play a crucial role in many fields of endeavor. As noted above it needs to be applied to help solve many of the world’s grand challenges.”

We’ve asked writer Nick Paul Taylor (Nature, Fierce Biotech) to research several innovators who are contributing to a multidisciplinary convergence right here in Boston. The paper is entitled: "Convergence in Boston: How Multidisciplinary R&D is driving bench to bedside breakthroughs".

Nick reports on what the Broad Institute, specifically in their Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project, is contributing to understanding disease in their work with genomics. Genomics has, since its earliest days, been a multidisciplinary field. The sequencing, analyzing, and contextualizing of genomes necessitates the input of experts from a broad range of backgrounds. Nick spoke with Kristin Ardlie, Ph.D., the Senior Research Scientist, Director of GTEx at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The GTEx project started in 2010 “with the goal of creating a comprehensive atlas and open database of gene expression and gene regulation across human tissues.” Nick explores Kristin Ardlie and the Broad Institute’s work to discover how and why the field of genomics needs to draw on a diversity of skills and disciplines to handle the myriad of tasks involved in understanding inherited susceptibility to disease.

We hope you enjoy Nick’s in-depth report. You can catch up with Kristin Ardlie and The Broad Institute’s Genotype-Tissue Expression projects newest research at Biotech Week Boston's Biorepositories and Sample Management event this October. Kristin will discuss GTEx Data and Analysis.

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