Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-4-2026
Original Citation
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Mondo: integrating disease terminology across communities. Genetics. 2026;232(4):iyaf215.
Keywords
JGM, Humans, Terminology as Topic, Precision Medicine, Biological Ontologies, Disease
JAX Source
Genetics. 2026;232(4):iyaf215.
ISSN
1943-2631
PMID
41052288
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/genetics/iyaf215
Abstract
Precision medicine aims to enhance diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis by integrating multimodal data at the point of care. However, challenges arise due to the vast number of diseases, differing methods of classification, and conflicting terminological coding systems and practices used to represent molecular definitions of disease. This lack of interoperability artificially constrains the potential for diagnosis, clinical decision support, care outcome analysis, as well as data linkage across research domains to support the development or repurposing of therapeutics. There is a clear and pressing need for a unified system for managing disease entities-including identifiers, synonyms, and definitions. To address these issues, we created the Mondo disease ontology-a community-driven, open-source, unified disease classification system that harmonizes diverse terminologies into a consistent, computable framework. Mondo integrates key medical and biomedical terminologies, including Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM), Orphanet, Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), National Cancer Institute Thesaurus (NCIt), and more, to provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of disease concepts with fully provenanced and attributed links back to the sources. Mondo can be used as the handle for curation of gene-disease associations utilized in diagnostic applications, research applications such as computational phenotyping, and in clinical coding systems in clinical decision support by pointing the clinician to the numerous knowledge resources linked to the Mondo identifier. Mondo's community-centric approach, stewarded by the Monarch Initiative's expertise in ontologies, ensures that the ontology remains adaptable to the evolving needs of biomedical research and clinical communities, as well as the knowledge providers.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.