Mark Daly, Ph.D.
Chief, Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit
Massachusetts General Hospital
Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School
Beyond GWAS: moving from genetics to therapeutic targets in inflammatory bowel disease
Genomewide association studies have been particularly effective in the inflammatory bowel diseases (Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis) with more than 200 confirmed associations described to date. In this talk I will highlight how recent progress in high-resolution mapping and exome sequencing is enabling the identification of actionable causal variants and the more specific molecular insights into pathogenesis. Detailed functional analysis of several of these findings are now yielding promising therapeutic hypotheses that may ultimately harbor some of the earliest instances in which truly novel discoveries from GWAS reach clinical relevance.
