While sharing the festive cheers we are very excited to restart HDR UK Cambridge Seminar Series in the new University of Cambridge Heart and Lung Research Institute (HLRI) located at the Addenbrooke’s site.

All seminars will be held in a hybrid environment, providing a wonderful opportunity to meet speakers in-person at the HLRI (0.R088-89 Meeting room) and/or join the exciting discussions virtually.

Keeping up the Holiday spirts Brunch – Lunch will be served (maybe some mince pie too)

Guest speakers are Peter Würtz and Heli Julkunen (Nightingale Health Plc)

Peter Würtz is Scientific Director and co-founder of Nightingale Health Plc, the Finnish innovator of an internationally recognized metabolomics platform for large cohorts, trials and clinical use. He is principal investigator of the Nightingale-UK Biobank initiative, aimed at NMR biomarker profiling of 500.000 blood samples. His research focuses on translation of biomarker profiling to preventative health checkups.

Heli Julkunen is Senior Data Scientist at Nightingale, and she has led pioneering studies on Nightingale profiling for biomarker discovery and risk prediction.

Title: The Value of Metabolomic Biomarkers in UK Biobank – Molecular Insights and Health Screening Opportunities

“Blood metabolites and lipids are predictors for future disease onset. We will show how biomarker profiling by Nightingale NMR in UK Biobank provides novel scientific insights on connections between different diseases and opens possibilities to predict the risk of many disease outcomes simultaneously.

Nightingale Health Plc has developed an NMR-based metabolomics assay, which quantifies lipoprotein lipids, fatty acids and small molecules such as amino acids, glycolysis metabolites and inflammation markers. These NMR biomarker profiles have recently been measured in 300,000 participants from UK Biobank. The initial results reveal a prominent role of abundant circulating lipids and metabolites as risk markers beyond cardiometabolic diseases, including susceptibility to infectious diseases and risk for the onset of respiratory diseases, joint disorders and mental health outcomes.

The talk will also highlight the application of the biomarkers for risk prediction of various common diseases to identify individuals at several fold increased risk compared to the remaining population. The prediction results complement information from polygenic risk scores. The results highlight how metabolomic profiling in large biobanks can accelerate translation and may find use for risk prediction of multiple common diseases. ”

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