Identifying Mechanistic Patient Sub-Groups Via Their Genomes

Supervisors
Konrad Rawlik, Konrad.Rawlik@roslin.ed.ac.uk
Ava Khamseh, ava.khamseh@ed.ac.uk

Project Description
The key challenge of precision medicine is “how and when to treat whom”, that is, identifying drug targets of relevance to specific individuals and stages of disease. Covid-19 gave us a ‘ready made’ clinically distinct sub-group of sepsis patients, and unlike for the broader syndrome, where failure to find effective treatments, often at the stage of phase II/III trials, is extensive [1], we were able to quickly identify effective re-purposing candidates [2]. The previous failures were a consequence of mechanistic heterogeneity between individuals with nominally the same condition and with-in an individual over the course of disease.