Approved Research

Charting the comprehensive landscape of infection and disease association using large-scale UK biobank cohort

Lay summary

There are cases where certain bacteria or viral infection is associated with future incidence of specific diseases. Most of these studies are focused on particular infection-disease pairs and systematic analysis on the infection-disease association landscape was not feasible due to the lack of such large-scale comprehensive data source. We believe UK biobank provides a unique opportunity to address this question to perform a systematic analysis to chart a comprehensive map of infection-disease association at a large-scale. We plan to analyze the large-scale multi-modal data provided by UK Biobank to discover the evidence for the association between the pathogen infection and the disease incidence. We will make sure to control for potential confounders such as genetic susceptibility from whole-exome (or whole-genome) sequencing data and additional clinical/physiological covariates. In addition, we might be able to find such infections that reduce (instead of increase) the incidence of specific diseases. In sum, charting the infection-disease landscape will help us developing improved disease therapeutics and preventions.