Hosted by the Population Health Science Institute
Polygenic risk scores (PRS) are a logical development of genome-wide association studies but their role in population health is unclear. I will review some recent developments that suggest that PRS behave like conventional biomarkers that are used in clinical practice, however, implementation of PRS is a huge challenge because of the lack of an installed base for running genome arrays at population scale as well as limitations of the current evidence for people from non-European ancestries. Our Future Health is a new cohort that aims to enrol a large number of UK adults and offer participants health risk information including, if they wish, Integrated Risk Scores that may include a PRS component. I will review plans for recruitment and researcher access to data.
Professor David Hunter is the Chief Science Advisor to Our Future Health, a major new national initiative in the UK that aims to return genomic information to consenting participants. Professor Hunter will speak about this exciting project during this one-hour online webinar.
Professor Hunter is also the Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine and Director of the Translational Epidemiology Unit at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, UK. He founded the Program in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics at Harvard and was co-chair of the steering committee of the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium at the National Cancer Institute. He was co-director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Susceptibility Markers project focused on genome-wide association studies, and Dean for Academic Affairs and Acting Dean at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.
Seminar room OS6 in Oakfield House is available to listen to the talk with colleagues, but please note David will be presenting remotely from Oxford.