BDI Seminar - Genetics studies for cardiometabolic traits facilitated by the Million Veteran Program
Benjamin F. Voight, PhD Associate Professor of Systems Pharmacology and Translational Therapeutics, Associate Professor of Genetics, University of Pennsylvania
Wednesday, 24 July 2019, 11am to 12pm
Seminar room 1, BDI, Old Road Campus, OX3 7LF
Abstract
The Million Veteran Program was established in 2011 as a national research initiative to determine how genetic variation influences the health of the diverse population of US military veterans. The goal of the program is to generate genetic data on over one million veterans, through genotyping and sequencing, connected to phenotype data extracted from electronic health records spanning a median of 10 years of follow-up. With over 500,000 individuals with genetic data available currently, this cohort enables a range of causal inference experiments and genetic analysis at scale in diverse ancestries. I will describe our ongoing work, focused on the genetic analysis for type 2 diabetes as well as studies for association with T2D complications. In addition, large-scale genetic analyses of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, enabled by an electronic health record definition of disease, including causal inference and genetic correlation studies for this trait.