MRC INTEGRATIVE EPIDEMIOLOGY UNIT (IEU)

 SEMINAR

 Friday, 4^th November, 2016
12.30 – 13.30 Room OS6 – Oakfield House

 Dr Jeff Barrett
Director, Open Targets
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute

  “Open Innovation Partnerships to bridge the gap from GWAS to drug targets”

 

Abstract

Nearly 85% of candidate drugs that enter clinical trials fail, and many of these are found not to work only after progression to expensive late phase trials. Fewer new medicines are coming to market, and those that do are more expensive because their success must pay for themselves as well as the development costs of the failures. It is therefore essential to find analyses and experiments that can test whether modulating a particular target will achieve therapeutic benefit in a particular disease. The field of complex disease genetics has been transformed in the last ten years by genome-wide association studies, low cost genome sequencing and rapid advances in our understanding of cellular phenotypes. I will describe how human genetics and large-scale genomics can change how we approach therapeutic target validation, and how open innovation partnerships involving pharma industry scientists working closely with academics can best bring these cutting edge datasets to bear on the problem. For example, http://targetvalidation.org, which is open to users worldwide, in industry or academia, integrates a dozen databases for prioritizing targets in a single analysis framework enabled by new statistical techniques and disease ontologies. I will also describe our improved analysis pipeline to connect GWAS hits to causal genes, illustrated by our work on inflammatory bowel disease. 

Biography

Jeff Barrett is Director of Open Targets, an open innovation partnership to use cutting-edge genomic results to improve the early stages of drug development. His research team at Sanger analyzes thousands of genomes to better understand the biology of a wide range of complex disorders

 

ALL WELCOME