Goal: To identify and evaluate causal risk factors for selected major diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, diabetes, and other age-related conditions, thus providing foundations for novel prevention, early detection and therapeutic strategies.
Achievements: We have led discovery of hundreds of genetic risk factors for a range of common diseases (eg, breast, prostate, and ovarian cancers; coronary disease; type 2 diabetes) and thousands of genetic risk factors for intermediate traits (eg, blood lipids, proteins) in >50 publications in Nature, Cell, Science and Nature Genetics in the past few years alone. These findings have opened new avenues of mechanistic understanding and helped industry prioritise novel therapeutic targets.