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.
Future plans: In an attempt to provide a more complete picture of the genetic basis of disease, our gene sequencing studies are being extended to >100,000 individuals, including tens of thousands with breast cancer or coronary disease as well as healthy controls. We have commenced large-scale “multi-omic” studies of >10,000 molecular traits to identify and understand potential predictors and determinants of disease.