Translating genomic medicine to patient treatment
Research of major public health significance is being advanced through large population health and disease cohorts and other approaches for discovery of biological markers of chronic and infectious disease. These efforts are powered by advances in technologies underpinning large-scale biology, and in quantitative methods, many based on new advances in computing technologies, that permit exploration of the underlying causality. We will discuss these advances and how they are giving rise to new understanding of disease pathogenesis that will be transformative for enabling new treatments against a wide spectrum of diseases. The speakers include academic and industry scientists who are leading breakthrough work on RNA-based medicine that has already had a profound impact for health. Related social issues and policy frameworks that are critical to the success of these endeavours will be addressed.
The above themes will be covered during the symposium in a series of sessions on the following topics:
Population health studies and large-scale biology
Technology advances for precision health
Computation and quantitative methodology
Improving health through tackling chronic and infectious disease
Policy and societal questions
Innovations for new vaccines and therapies
Showcase and training workshop for UK Biobank and other population cohort studies
The symposium will provide an opportunity to learn in-depth about UK Biobank, which is the world’s leading population health study to link genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and imaging to health and environmental/lifestyle information databases on large-scale, and how the UK Biobank data can be accessed and exploited by academic and industry researchers worldwide.
Speakers will highlight recent UK Biobank data, including the whole-genome sequence of all the approximately 500,000 study participants, and provide examples of the use of UK Biobank data to power precision medicine. Results from other cohort studies, including Biobank Japan, will be presented and questions of how data from different cohorts are combined to create a comprehensive, multi-ancestry view of health will be discussed.