Approved Research

Using Nomaly and other approaches to investigate the UK Biobank CNS disease datasets for novel target identification and phenotypic subtypes

Lay summary

There are quite a few diseases of the central nervous system, including Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and dementia. These diseases are believed to be influenced by genetics. This project will examine the genomes of people in the UKBiobank who are recorded as having these diseases and compare them to others who do not have any of these diseases. By comparing in this way we hope to uncover genetic links to the diseases that we can understand scientifically from a biological point of view.

The benefit of any discoveries that we make, besides simply advancing our knowledge of the genetics of the disease, could provide information on biological process implicated in these diseases. It will also allow us to identify disease subgroups with biological and clinical relevance, leading eventually to developing new medical treatments for these diseases, or ways to recognise the disease early and slow down the progress.