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).

Tim Elliott left the University of Oxford (Balliol) with a first in Biochemistry in 1983 and completed his PhD in cancer immunotherapy at the University of Southampton in 1986. He did his postdoctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Herman Eisen at the Center for Cancer Research. In 1990 he returned to the University of Oxford to join the Institute for Molecular Medicine as a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, joining a key group of immunologists studying antigen presentation at the molecular level. In 1993 he was appointed to a lectureship and later a Professorship at Balliol College, University of Oxford, as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow in Basic Biomedical Science. In 2000, he moved to the University of Southampton as Professor of Experimental Oncology and five years later became Associate Dean for the Faculty of Medicine. In 2015 he stepped down from this role to take up interim Pro Vice Chancellor (Research) for the University of Southampton. He was the Founding Director of the new Southampton Centre for Cancer Immunology which opened in 2018, and Deputy Director of the interdisciplinary Southampton Institute for Life Sciences for which he is now an external consultant. He is a world leader in the field of antigen presentation and T cell biology and has incorporated discoveries in the areas of antigen processing, T cell regulation and immunodominance into the development of new cancer immunotherapies and is the recipient of a Royal Society/Wolfson Research Merit Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Biology and Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences; founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Immunotherapy Advances published by the British Society for Immunology; and chairs the Cancer Research UK Cancer Immunology expert review committee. Professor Elliott was appointed to the Kidani Chair of Immuno-Oncology at the University of Oxford in 2020.

The theme of reproducibility in science is explored in a virtual fireside chat with Dr Stuart Ritchie, Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London and author of the best-selling book Science Fictions. He is joined by Dr Marcus Munafo, Professor of Biological Psychology at the University of Bristol and Dr Malika Ihle, Reproducible Research Oxford Coordinator. Dr Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature, chairs this fascinating evening of conversation.

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 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.

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.