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Approved Research

Phenome-Wide Association Studies of the immune-related genetic variants

Principal Investigator: Dr Yongyue Wei
Approved Research ID: 57471
Approval date: July 30th 2020

Lay summary

A wide range of diseases are linked to the immune function alteration, such as cancer, asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Identifying the immune-related biomarkers (e.g. genetic variant, laboratory biomarkers) is very important to find the individuals with high-risk and develop strategies for disease prevention. Thus, we aim to conduct a Phenome-Wide Association Study between various phenotypes (e.g. disease risk, inflammation biomarkers) and immune-related genetic variants in UK Biobank. We are going to identify the association between genetic variants of immune related genes across different phenotypes such as cancer and respiratory diseases, perform the phenome-wide Mendelian-randomization study on the immune mediators and develop a bioinformatics algorithm to evaluate their immune priority index among different traits. Identification of biomarkers including genetic variants, genes, pathways for different phenotypes will help researchers further understand the disease entity and focus on drug target for treatment.

We would like to request access to the full cohort. After we get the data, we need 6 months to do the data cleaning, 6 months for data analysis, 8 months for bioinformatics algorithm development, 4 months for paper drafting and 4 months for paper submitting and revising. The total period is 28 months.