Talk by Professor George Davey Smith; ‘Some constraints on the scope and potential of personalised medicine’. Filmed on 30th January 2020 at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford.
A talk given on 2 June 2020 as part of the St Anne’s Online series. Professor Simon Leedham is a Wellcome Senior Research Fellow in Clinical Science, Honorary Consultant Gastroenterologist and the Director of the Centre for Personalised Medicine. In this talk Simon explores the use of genetic investigation to help guide precision treatments in cancer and explores the possibilities, the potential and the pitfalls of personalised medicine in the modern day NHS.
Talk given by John Mattick, former Chief Executive of Genomics England, in Oxford on 17th May 2019. Abstract: The genomic programming of complex organisms appears to have been misunderstood. The human genome contains just ~20,000 protein-coding genes, similar in number and with largely orthologous functions as those in other animals, including simple nematodes. By contrast, the extent of non-protein-coding DNA increases with increasing developmental complexity, reaching 98.5% in humans, presumably due to an expanded regulatory architecture. Moreover, it is now clear that the majority of the genome is differentially and dynamically transcribed to produce not only mRNAs but also tens if not hundreds of thousands of short and long non-protein-coding RNAs that show highly specific expression patterns and subcellular locations, with many shown to play important aetiological roles in development, brain function, cancer and other diseases. These ‘noncoding’ RNAs function at many different levels of gene expression and cell biology, including translational control, subcellular domain formation, and guidance of the epigenetic processes that underpin development, brain function and physiological adaptation, augmented by the superimposition of plasticity by RNA editing, RNA modification and retrotransposon mobilization. The evidence is now overwhelming that there is a massive hidden layer of RNA-mediated regulatory and architectural functions in humans and other complex organisms and that the current model of gene regulation is incomplete. The challenge now is to determine the structure-function relationships of these RNAs and their mechanisms of action, as well as their place in the decisional hierarchy that controls human development, physiology, cognitive function and susceptibility to disorders.
On 12th November 2015 the Centre for Personalised Medicine hosted a lecture by Prof Steve Sturdy of the University of Edinburgh on the topic The Genomic Revolution in Medicine: Historical Perspectives. Prof Sturdy provided a very engaging historical perspective on the scientific, technological, social and political processes that have led to the current ferment of activity around genomic medicine. The lecture promoted cross-disciplinary discourse; there were over 40 attendees from humanities, including Oxford Brookes University’s Centre for Medical Humanities and Oxford University’s Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, as well as science and medicine. Introduction from Tim Gardam, Principal, St Anne’s College, Oxford University.
Dr Jason Torres gave this talk at St Anne’s College on Tuesday 16th July 2024.
Dr Leah Boyle gave this talk at St Anne’s College on Tuesday 16th July 2024.
When a child is diagnosed with a serious genetic condition caused by a new genetic change (de novo mutation), parents often worry about the chances of this happening again in future pregnancies. Currently, the general recurrence risk given in clinic is a population average (usually ~1-2%). However, there is now a new strategy, called PREGCARE, that can refine this risk for each individual couple. This presentation by Professor Anne Goriely and Dr Alison Kay from the University of Oxford explores how it works, its potential benefits and what it means from a practitioner’s perspective. Dr Emilie Wigdor introduces the session.
Hear from Professor Lindgren about how Oxford researchers at the BDI are developing, evaluating and deploying efficient methods for acquiring and analysing information for large clinical research studies to identify the associations between lifestyle exposures, genetic variants, infections and health outcomes around the globe. Cecilia Lindgren has a PhD in Molecular Genetics with a specialisation in endocrinology from the University of Lund, completed in sponsorship by the Witehead Institute at MIT, Cambridge, USA. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Lund and at the Karolinska Institutet, and a Scholar in Residence at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, USA, before joining the University of Oxford. She is a Wellcome Trust Investigator and co-founder/co-chair of the International Common Disease Alliance. She has been a Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s since 2016, when she joined the steering group of the Centre for Personalised Medicine (at St Anne’s).
Holly Eggington is a DPhil student in Cancer Science, studying interaction between cellular compartments in colorectal cancer at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. She is also a medical student, passionate about bridging the boundary between laboratory and clinical research, as well as being President of the Oxford University Personalised Medicine (OUPM) Society.