GWAS: The Rise of Hypothesis-Free Biomedical Science

Global Health Since March 2001, I have been working together with Professor Harry Campbell as a Technical Expert within the Child Health Epidemiology Reference Group (CHERG) of the World Health Organisation and UNICEF. Dr Campbell and I have led several large international projects, some funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that helped to reduce global mortality from pediatric infectious diseases, particularly childhood pneumonia and neonatal sepsis. Through our global health policy work we contributed to reduction of global child mortality (UN's Millennium Development Goal 4) from 12 million (in 2000) to under 7 million (in 2010). Working as a consultant for Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative (CHNRI) of the Global Forum for Health Research and funded mainly by the World Bank, I developed a systematic methodology for setting priorities in global health research investments (the CHNRI methodology), which has been implemented by the World Health Organization and several national governments to identify research priorities to reduce global child mortality, resulting in more than 20 reports in leading international health journals ("The Lancet" and "PLoS Medicine").

Genetic Epidemiology

Since 1999 I have been developing the biobank called "10,001 Dalmatians" in a series of genetic isolate islands off the coast of Dalmatian region in Croatia. In collaboration with co-Principal Investigators Professors Harry Campbell, Alan Wright and Nick Hastie, we obtained support in excess of GBP 15 million to explore the genetic architecture of complex quantitative biological traits that underlie common late-onset diseases of public health importance. Since 2006, we published more than 150 original research papers, 30 of which in the leading journals in the field - "Nature" or "Nature Genetics". We assigned function to more than 500 human genes to date, discovering genetic variants that underlie gout, coronary heart disease, diabetes type 2, chronic kidney disease, lung function, human height, weight and body mass index, blood pressure, blood lipid and glucose levels, blood clotting factors, uric acid levels, age at menarche and menopause, ECG traits, eye, behaviour and sleep-related traits, predisposition to smoking, "-omics" biochemical traits (such as glycomics and lipidomics), and many others. We are currently applying whole-genome sequencing technologies in search for rare genetic variants with large influence on human traits and diseases. I am currently developing a large biobank in low and middle income countries in collaboration with the World Health Organization, that will focus on genetic determinants of maternal and newborn health - "Generation 2015".

Med-Info Consulting Ltd, Split, Croatia Senior Lecturer in Human Genomics, Faculty of Medicine, School of Public Health, Imperial College London, London, UK