How Can Omic Science be Improved?

One of the promises of multiomic analysis was to transform the clinical diagnostics to deliver much more exact phenotyping of disease states. However, despite enormous investments, the transformation of clinical routine has not taken place. There are many reasons for this lack of success but one is the failure to deliver quantitative and reproducible data. This failure is not only impeding progress in clinical phenotyping but also in the application of omic science in systems biology. The focus in this Viewpoint will be on lipidomics but the lessons learned are generally applicable.