Speaker: Professor Kenneth Baillie, Personal Chair of Experimental Medicine, University of Edinburgh

Abstract:

Most drugs work by targeting specific proteins in the body, but for most diseases, we don't know the right proteins to target. Even after tens of millions of pounds of development and evaluation, most drugs fail because they lack efficacy. They don't work.

Genetics can point to the right proteins to target. But the problem is that we don't understand the genetic code well enough to go from a single variant to a molecular mechanism. A variant might be a single position in the genome where one person has an "A" and another person has a "T". In the majority of cases, even when we know a variant is strongly associated with a disease, we don't know what proteins the variant affects, in which cell types.

The solutions may involve focused data generation - for example, surveying the proximal molecular consequences of genetic variation - and integrating functional data to make better predictions about what genetic variants do. This seminar will discuss the current state of the art, and applications for new machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches.

Speaker bio:

Kenneth Baillie graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a BSc(Hons) in Physiology in 1999 and MBChB in 2002. He completed basic training in medicine in Glasgow, and in anesthesia in Edinburgh. During this time he led a series of high altitude research projects in Bolivia, and founded a high-altitude research charity, Apex. He was appointed as a clinical lecturer on the ECAT (Edinburgh Clinical Academic Track) at the University of Edinburgh in 2008, and completed a Wellcome Trust-funded PhD in statistical genetics in 2012. He was awarded a Wellcome-Beit Prize Intermediate Clinical Fellowship in 2013. He led a global consensus on harmonisation of research studies in outbreaks for the International Severe Acute Respiratory Infection Consortium (ISARIC), and worked with WHO on H1N1 influenza, MERS, and Ebola. After completing clinical training in 2014 he worked as a visiting scientist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, before returning to the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh to establish a research program in translational applications of genomics in critical care medicine. He works as a consultant in the intensive care unit at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh. During the Covid outbreak in 2020-21, he led the UK-wide GenOMICC and ISARIC4C studies, and contributed to the design and delivery of the RECOVERY trial. He discovered new biological mechanisms underlying critical illness in Covid, and contributed to the discovery of effective drug treatments to reduce mortality.