Advancing understanding, prediction, prevention and treatment of coronary heart disease through application of genetics to UK Biobank

Coronary heart disease (CHD) and heart attack is caused by a combination of inherited and lifestyle/environmental factors. 17,000 new cases of CHD are expected to develop in the UK Biobank participants by 2017. The aims of our research are use the genetic data being generated in UK Biobank to identify genes that affect risk of CHD, investigate whether specific genes and certain lifestyle factors such as smoking interact to increase risk, determine whether adding genetic information can improve prediction of CHD, and identify causal mechanisms for CHD that can be targeted to develop new treatments. UK Biobank was established to improve understanding of the causes of common diseases and particularly the interaction between genes and environment and life-style factors. CHD is the commonest cause of death and disability world-wide. It is the archetypal disease caused by an interaction between inherited and environmental/lifestyle factors. Our research will improve understanding of the genetic causes of CHD, how these interact with environmental/lifestyle factors and how the findings can be applied to improving prediction, prevention and treatment of CHD. We will divide the UK Biobank participants into those with CHD (cases) and those without (controls) and compare their genetic information generated using the UK Biobank array to identify genetic variants that are associated with development of CHD. We will use lifestyle/environmental information collected on participants to see if there is an interaction between such factors (e.g smoking) and genes in increasing CHD risk. We will investigate whether adding genetic information to current methods can improve prediction of development of CHD. We will use genetic approaches to define the best targets to develop drugs against to tackle CAD We plan to use the full cohort for our studies.