Using genetic data to identify and characterise subtypes of asthma, to inform drug development and precision medicine. (360G-Wellcome-228299_Z_23_Z)

Asthma is an umbrella term for multiple diseases. Patients present symptoms in different ways, including the age at which they start to experience symptoms, how severe their symptoms are, other health conditions, and differences between the sexes. My project aims to look at how changes in people’s DNA (genetic variants) affect the clinical characteristics (traits) they present, and what this shows about different biological processes underlying subtypes of asthma. I will do this by: \- Finding traits which are related to asthma. \- Using an algorithm to cluster groups of patients with similar genetic variants and traits together. \- Generating risk scores for each subtype by adding up variant effect sizes. I will be using data from UK Biobank, a study with half a million volunteer participants, and also specific studies of asthma patients. I hope that the results from this will be able to provide new insights into the genetic causes behind different biological processes for asthma subtypes. This could help us to understand how best to develop and target new treatments for asthma patients.