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Progress in genomics and other high throughput “-omic” technologies is promising to revolutionize the practice of epidemiology by providing new tools to measure exposures, susceptibility, and disease outcomes. New platforms of biomarker measurement are becoming increasingly available for epidemiologic studies. Examples include genomic, proteomic, metabolomic, noncoding RNA, epigenomic, mitochondrial DNA, telomerase, and microbiota studies. In addition, environmental measurements are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the exposome holds promise with regard to measuring the impact of multiple exposures on health outcomes (1).

Omic technologies pose many challenges regarding the collection, analysis, validation, replication, and eventual utility of this information for medicine and public health (2). We should always be mindful of the potential pitfalls of adopting new technologies too soon. Because of this, the relationship between technologies and epidemiology is bidirectional. Although new omic technologies provide the tools to enhance epidemiologic research, epidemiology is needed to test and validate the application of these technologies for use in population settings (3).

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