Twenty years ago, scientists sequenced the first human genome, with the promise of precision medicine: armed with this new information, we would be able to identify precise, therapeutic targets for all kinds of diseases.

Since then, tremendous advances in sequencing and computing technology have resulted in the cataloging of more than 250,000 unique risk variants associated with disease.

However, this effort has not resulted in cures for common diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, or diabetes. Why? Because of the incredible genetic complexity underlying all human diseases.

What’s next? We have to unpack this complex web if we want to make progress with precision medicine. At JAX, we focused on making precision medicine a reality through our predictive biology initiatives. The first step in providing a roadmap towards this goal is The Cube Initiative. The Cube Initiative brings together JAX’s power to scale, iterate and interrogate data across humans and mouse models. Here’s how it works:

The Cube Initiative is central to our Predictive Biology vision. Our approach is to pick a human disease of interest, and collect as much clinical, genomic and genetic information we can find from public and in-house generated datasets.

And then, we design comprehensive experiments with advanced mouse populations to match those human datasets as closely as possible with a high degree of genetic diversity.

We capture all these dimensions of data: genotype by phenotype by environment; by tissue and cell; for humans and mice. We integrate multiple layers of genomic and proteomic information.

From these large scale datasets, we're developing predictive algorithms, models and new hypotheses. And then we can go back, validate the predictions in the mouse and iteratively refine the models.

The idea is to create a flywheel at scale — an accelerator for understanding the connections between genetic variation and function in disease pathogenesis across tissues and across time.

Predictive biology initiatives: Collaborate with us

Big ideas require partnership. To leverage the team-science approach at The Jackson Laboratory, the Laboratory welcomes opportunities to collaborate on The Cube Initiative and other projects with researchers and scientists in support of the research and data tools required to drive predictive biology. 

To learn more or inquire about predictive biology collaboration opportunities, please email cube@jax.org.