Vural Özdemir, M.D., Ph.D., is editor-in-chief of OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. He is also an associate professor of human genetics at the council of higher education in Ankara, Turkey, and an independent scholar in science studies and advisor to the office of the president for international technology policy at Gaziantep University, also in Turkey.
Dr. Özdemir is one of the world’s leading scientific and policy advocates for moving OMICS discovery research to clinical practice and public health action. He has published extensively on OMICS biotech applications in medicine and public health, personalized healthcare, postgenomics diagnostics, and OMICS innovation policy, and he has supervised the publication of special issues of the OMICS journal focused on postgenomics fields such as vaccinomics, nutrigenomics, public health genomics, and theranostics.
Dr. Özdemir is especially supportive of the emerging discipline of nutrigenomics, which searches for the genetic factors that influence the body’s response to diet and explores how the bioactive constituents of food affect gene expression. He believes that in the future nutrigenomics may help guide the development of customized diets based on an individual’s genetic make-up.
In addition, he is one of the early proponents for the study of vaccinomics, which relies on the integrated use of multi-omics data intensive biotechnologies (e.g., genomics, proteomics, metabolomics) to understand individual and population differences in immune responses to vaccines. Vaccinomics, according to Dr. Özdemir, holds great promise for the design of safer and more effective vaccines and their targeted rational use via novel postgenomics diagnostics to prevent and combat infectious diseases. The discipline also points to interventions in chronic noncommunicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and obesity.
