Staff from the University of Malta’s TargetMI project attended the Festival of Genomics & Biodata 2025 in London, UK from 29-30 January 2025, which is the UK’s largest life sciences event. In attendance were over 7,000 attendees from over 55 countries.
Two posters from TargetMI project members were presented at the Festival: Prof. Stephanie Bezzina Wettinger presented "TargetMI: A Multi-Omics Approach for Novel Drug Targets, Biomarkers and Risk Algorithms for Myocardial Infarction." Ms Francesca Borg Carbott presented "Ensuring Data Quality in Multiomics: Pre-Analytical Measures taken for the MAMI and Malta NGS Studies." Other attendees from the TargetMI project include Prof. Jean Paul Ebejer, Prof. Melissa Formosa, Mr Matthew Vella, Mr Edward Blake, Mr Luke Cassar, and Ms Charlene Portelli, as well as Mr Donald Friggieri from the BioGeMT project. Mr. Andras Havasi from the Corporate Research and Knowledge Transfer Office joined the team at the conference and assisted them with networking. This was a unique opportunity for the team to network with industry, startups, academia, and researchers.
TargetMI: A Multi-Omics Approach for Novel Drug Targets, Biomarkers and Risk Algorithms for Myocardial Infarction is a 5-year €4 million project funded by Horizon Europe’s European Innovation Council’s Pathfinder Programme. The project kicked off in October 2023 and is coordinated by Prof. Stephanie Bezzina Wettinger from the Department of Applied Biomedical Science, Faculty of Health Sciences and the CMMB, University of Malta (UM), and the team from LUMC is led by Prof. Frits Rosendaal. Members of the BioGeMT project, led by Dr. Panagiotis Alexiou, also from the CMMB and the Faculty of Health Sciences (UM), are also assisting with the project.
Cardiovascular disease is a major cause of death and morbidity worldwide, with highly complex causes that involve genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors. The goal of TargetMI is to combat coronary heart disease by developing biomarkers & risk algorithms to identify people at risk and applying a data-driven high throughput multi-omic approach for the rapid discovery of novel drug targets.
More information is available on the TargetMI project website: https://www.um.edu.mt/
You can follow project happenings on the TargetMI LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/
