Poulomi, we tend to think of multiomic studies as focused on oncology and drug development in oncology, but many other therapeutic developments depend on multiomic measurements. Is that correct?
Dr. Acharya: Yes. The number of publications on multiomics research doubled between 2024 and 2025. That tells us there is a definitive move to have a more complete picture of a particular disease, whether related to aging, neurodegeneration, oxidative stress-driven diseases, protein-folding disorders—all kinds of disease and therapeutic areas where multiomics research is becoming more and more important. It’s more on understanding the basic biology of disease, three dimensionally inside a cell, so we can intervene and know how and where to attack.
We expect the exponential increase in publications on multiomics and accumulating data will form a more complete picture and lead to more translational and clinical applications.
Ravi, for readers who may be entering a more complex laboratory environment than they’re used to, how does Thermo Fisher help with the scientific questions? In other words, I’m interested in X,Y, and Z—how can you help me formulate plates, features, and programs?
Ravi Gupta: We have products and solutions from qPCR to open array to Sanger sequencing and fragment analysis to next-generation sequencing and microarrays. We work with customers to understand the question they are trying to answer and offer them the right tool for the job. Customers don’t have to work with multiple vendors and parties; they can choose from our comprehensive offering.
A key value proposition of the microarray technology we offer is customization. We offer off-the-shelf products—the PharmacoPro and PangenomePro—but if a customer needs a particular array and set of targets for a specific disease or research area, we are happy to work with them and create a custom
solution so they can get a targeted answer.
Robert, how were the PharmacoPro and PangenomePro array plates developed?
Dr. Balog: The PangenomePro is our flagship for genomewide association studies [GWAS]. It has content-specific modules for cardiovascular disease—pharmacogenomics, human leukocyte antigen—found in the literature, but it also has a GWAS backbone designed with the latest public databases to ensure we have coverage across all populations. This array was designed for the ability to impute. Many times when two variants are close by, they’re inherited together. If you know one, you know the other; you’re sequencing information you already had. These arrays can impute another 20 million to 30 million variants with high accuracy from multiple populations.
The PharmacoPro array was designed for clinical applications and focuses on variants known to be involved in pharmacogenomics. It includes all AMP content. CPIC [Clinical Pharmacogenetics Implementation Consortium] guidelines and ClinPGx levels are included. Beyond that, we have another 10,000 lower-evidence markers. These are markers where we’ve gone through the literature or used other guidelines that people have associated with drug response, but the clinical evidence perhaps isn’t there to have high levels of confidence. Many customers in the clinical segment are interested in ensuring they can return information on well-known markers, but they also have research groups that want to understand what new markers are coming in the future. We’ve in essence future-proofed this—once a laboratory has completed the validation process for this array and workflow, it will be able to include markers that currently have lower clinical evidence as that evidence builds and have already validated the process.
In other words, if they have the plates and system, the software can assist in making further discoveries and connections between what they find in the samples they’re testing? Poulomi, is that fair to say?
Dr. Acharya: Yes, it is. Some clinical labs want to report to the patient only on their own set of VIP markers. They don’t want the discovery markers that have a low degree of evidence to be connected to a certain type of drug response, for example. We can mark anything the customer wants to report—for example, if a customer wants only the markers that have direct clinical relevance to make an informed medical decision for dosing a patient with a particular drug, or a curated star allele report relevant to their patient population. It goes across a wide set of ancestry so the information is relevant no matter where you are running your pharmacogenomics program. The software is flexible and can offer exactly what people need to make informed downstream decisions.
Our bioinformatics capability and pipeline is another area of strength. When we sell a solution or workflow, our state-of-the-art bioinformatics team comes with it. Now you have a partner who can do the bioinformatics work and with whom you can consult if you’re starting a new genomewide association study or pharmacogenomics program.