Lectures and seminars MEB seminar: Dr James Peters

Abstract

The advent of new high-throughput technologies means it is now possible to measure the plasma proteome at scale. In this talk, I will describe our work using multiple proteomic platforms to inform our understanding of human diseases. In particular, I will focus on our recent study as part of the SCALLOP consortium, mapping protein quantitative trait loci (pQTLs) for 91 inflammation-related proteins in >15,000 participants. I will illustrate how these genotype-protein associations can be integrated with disease genome-wide association study (GWAS) data to identify causal pathways using the technique of Mendelian randomisation, overcoming the problems of confounding and reverse causation that affect human observational data. Our findings provide new insights into the molecular pathways involved in immune-mediated diseases, and highlight potential therapeutic targets.

Biography

James (“Jimmy”) Peters is a clinician scientist, who leads a genomics research group at Imperial College London. He graduated in clinical medicine from the University of Edinburgh and later completed post-graduate specialist training in Rheumatology in London. He received an MPhil in Computational Biology and PhD in genomics from the University of Cambridge. He did a post-doc in genetic epidemiology with Professor John Danesh at the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit in Cambridge. Since 2019, Jimmy has been leading a research group at the Imperial College London that works at the interface of molecular epidemiology, computational biology and clinical medicine. The group researches the molecular and cellular basis of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases using genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics, combining both in-house and public datasets.

This seminar is open to everyone, welcome to Petrén lecture hall.