Visiting the Festival of Genomics

30-31 January, ExCel Exhibition Centre, London

By Ana Sredic-Rhodes, Programme PhD student

Last week I spent two days in London at the Festival of Genomics - an event that brings together molecular biologists, geneticists, bioinformaticians and clinicians from academia, healthcare, and pharma.

The festival included an impressive update from the 100,000 Genomes Project by Malcom Grant, the chairman of NHS England. Even though it is still early days (only around 2,000 cancer patient genomes have been sequenced so far) over half of the patients involved have been found to have an ‘actionable’ mutation enabling them to receive a more effective treatment. I left this talk excited about using this data as part of my project and about the potential of genomics to improve patient diagnosis and treatment.

My other favourite talks were those that focussed on Pharmacogenomics - using genetics to predict a likely outcome to treatment. I gained a lot of new ideas for my project, especially as all the research presented involved using clinical trial data. I will be discussing some new ideas to utilise routine registry data to conduct similar studies with my supervisors.

Overall, it was a great couple of days, I learnt a lot, and left with some new ideas!

 

Ana is in the first year of her PhD and is adding genetic information to routine bowel cancer data to understand susceptibility and outcome.