Changes in the environment surrounding cells, such as tissue stiffness, mechanical forces from movement or load, and signals exchanged between cells and their surrounding matrix, are increasingly recognized as important drivers of many diseases. These extracellular mechanisms influence how cells grow, adapt, and respond to stress, and have been linked to conditions including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and osteoporosis. Despite their importance, most studies examine these mechanisms within individual diseases, leaving their shared roles across multiple conditions poorly understood.
The United Kingdom Biobank is a large population research resource that includes long-term health data from hundreds of thousands of participants. These data cover genetics, gene and protein activity across tissues, lifestyle and physical activity measures, blood biomarkers, medical imaging, and clinical outcomes over time. This unique combination of data enables systematic investigation of how extracellular mechanisms contribute to disease risk and progression across many conditions.
This project aims to develop standardized methods to quantify extracellular mechanism-related features, such as tissue stiffness-associated molecular patterns, protein expression levels, and extracellular matrix composition, using gene and protein data from the United Kingdom Biobank. We will assess how these features relate to more than ten diseases, including several cancers and chronic non-cancer conditions, to identify both shared and disease-specific patterns. We will also examine how genetics, physical activity, and environmental factors influence these mechanisms and contribute to disease risk. Ultimately, this work seeks to identify therapeutic targets relevant across multiple diseases and to develop an early pilot tool that integrates extracellular mechanism data to support disease risk prediction.