Research Seminar: Ella Whittle and Jonathan Mitchell

The Genomics England Research Seminar series is a season of events held to demonstrate the best research from Genomics England and our partners. They started in October 2018, and are monthly, free-to-attend talks presented by Research Network members on the latest research being performed using data from the National Genomic Research Library.

This month's seminar speakers from the Therapeutic Innovation and Trials community will be:

Ella Whittle - The UK Platform for Nucleic Acid Therapies Target Selection Guidelines for Antisense Oligonucleotide Therapies

Ella is a Research Fellow based at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health within the MRC/NIHR UK Platform for Nucleic Acid Therapies (UPNAT). Her research focuses on developing a target selection strategy for nucleic acid therapies (NATs) in the UK, to support rapid bench to bedside translation of NATs. The UPNAT guidelines on target selection will facilitate prioritisation of patients for antisense oligonucleotide treatments via assessment of disease, functional model, variant and patient characteristics. These guidelines will be tested using real-world data, including the Genomics England National Genomic Research Library, to evaluate usability and subsequently to determine targets for treatment. 

Jonathan Mitchell - Genomics Driven Drug Discovery with the National Genomic Research Library 

As an analyst at AstraZeneca's Centre for Genomics Research, Jonathan Mitchell works with large scale biomedical data to derive insights for drug target identification and biomarker discovery. Previously, Jonathan worked as an analyst at Genomics England, as part of the team developing the pipeline to bring whole genome sequence testing to cancer patients in the NHS.

About the research seminars

The seminars will be held on the last Tuesday of each month at 2 to 3pm. These will be online sessions open to everyone and free to attend, we hope to have representation from across the Research Network, Discovery Forum and 100,000 Genomes Project participants as well as anyone else who would be interested in joining.

For updates on the seminars including announcements and speakers please follow the Genomics England twitter page. You can watch all previous Research Seminars on the Genomics England YouTube channel.

If you would like to present your research from the Genomics England Research Environment at one of these events please get in touch with the Research Management team at [email protected] and if you intend to publish on this research please include this so that we can publicise your paper on our Publications page.