Edward Blake and Luke Cassar from the TargetMI project at the University of Malta recently attended the EMBL-EBI Training, Gene-environment Interactions in Human Health and Disease at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in Hinxton, UK.
This course covered topics such as the relationship between genes and the environment in shaping human phenotypes, cohort datasets, environmental readouts, computational resources for investigating gene-environment interactions, polygenic risk score analysis, ethical and legal frameworks related to data privacy and consent, and computational modelling techniques for integrating genotype and environmental effects. The main skill sets learned were the ability to locate and analyse cohort datasets, use computational resources and techniques, and interpret the results. The training also allowed for discussions with other course participants and trainers about their research.
Read more about the training online.
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.
You can also follow the project on LinkedIn.
