How to establish causality via patient observation

Because finding causal targets is a question of determining “what came first,” the genomic blueprints that precede pathology are the widely favored place to start. As company strategies to extract value from genomic signals diversify, a push toward longitudinal studies promises to grow industry’s capacity to extract causal biology from phenotyping technologies.

Although genomics data have not been the target discovery panacea envisioned during the Human Genome Project era, the data stand head and shoulders above other types of observational human data, both in terms of its abundance, and its documented link to clinical success. ...