Approved Research

Using and developing the hypothesis-free technology Nomaly to investigate the UK Biobank datasets for improved understanding of unexplained diseases and phenotypes, and for novel target identification

Lay summary

This team has developed a new method for genomic interpretation called Nomaly. Existing methods for genomic interpretation have yielded many scientific discoveries and medical advances when through their application to the genomic data of the participants in UKBiobank. Our aim over 3 years is to increase the scientific and medical output of UKBiobank by applying our new method to the genomic data. Whilst our method is not a replacement or improvement on excellent existing methods, it can be considered as an addition to existing methods. By adding something extra to the overall results of all analyses on UKBiobank, we are contributing to the scientific knowledge of disease mechanisms and potentially to the development of new drugs to treat those diseases, or to the pool of medical knowledge that allows doctors to better select which treatments will be most helpful to which patients. We do not know at the outset for which diseases we may be able to have an impact on public health for, so we may need to test this new Nomaly method on many diseases to find this out. The participants of UKBiobank have provided a unique opportunity to analyse large scale genomic data across numerous diseases, necessary for this project to succeed and for Nomaly to bring improvements to public health.