IEU Seminar: Mark McCarthy

Title: Embedding multimodal discovery in pharma.

 

Abstract: Six years ago, I surrendered the comforts and eternal sunshine of Oxford academia, for the windswept wastelands of California pharma. I will describe some of the approaches we use to make genetics and  genomics at scale relevant to the challenging task of bringing new medicines to patients.

 

Biography: Mark McCarthy is Executive Director of Human Genetics, and Principal Fellow at Genentech, based in South San Francisco, California. At Genentech, Mark leads efforts across the company to generate and use data from human genetics to support the full arc of drug discovery from target identification through to patient stratification and clinical trial design. Mark trained in medicine, with a speciality in endocrinology and diabetes, and during his academic career, combined clinical practice with academic research. Most recently, he was the Robert Turner Professor of Diabetic Medicine at the University of Oxford, where he was a leader in global efforts to understand the genetic and molecular basis of type 2 diabetes and obesity through the large-scale integration of clinical, genetic and genomic data from across the globe. He moved to Genentech in 2019, and since then has been heavily involved in efforts to ensure that research within Roche/Genentech is driven by scientific insights from diverse global populations; and that the medicines that are built from those insights are effective and safe for all.