Molecular phenotyping to explore individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle, allows doctors and researchers to predict more accurately which treatment and prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in which groups of people.
Southampton is in a unique position because we have experts in numerous ’omic technologies and data science and have excellent collaboration with our clinical partners both in the UK and across Europe.
By working together researchers can really understand the mechanisms behind diseases. Not only are we carrying out the innovative research here, but our established clinical links mean we can translate that research into the clinic and through to the patient.
By using molecular signatures from multi omics data - genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, glycomics and metabolomics-in combination with clinical data, we can enable better tailoring of existing treatments, and pave the way for the development of new therapeutics and diagnostics for improved patient outcome.
The data that we are generating from this research is huge, and the Integrative Molecular Phenotyping Centre enables us to develop critical new approaches to integrate and analyse this data and extract the information we need from these big datasets.
Our impact
Southampton is already making an impact in molecular phenotyping and precision medicine.
TopMD
TopMD is a group of scientists and mathematicians from the University whose exciting research is promising to revolutionise healthcare by allowing high resolution investigation of molecular mechanisms underlying disease, and therefore enabling development of targeted treatments for application in personalised medicine. They are using revolutionary topological algorithms to plot the shape of a patient’s gene expression and compare it to the shape of gene expression characteristic of diseases for precise and accurate diagnosis.
Asthma
Using clinical and ’omics data from hundreds of adults and children with severe asthma we are able to understand more about different types of asthma to ensure better diagnosis and treatment for each person and uncover new information and ideas that could lead to the creation of effective new treatments. The team has recently identified novel molecular sub-types of asthma that are used in clinical trials to better predict therapeutic efficacy.
Cancer
In collaboration with the Southampton Centre for Cancer Immunology, the team is using multi-omics approaches to identify human leukocyte antigen (HLA) class-I and class-II peptides presented to T-cells in a number of cancers which are crucial for designing innovative personalised therapeutics and vaccines against cancer and other diseases.
Breast cancer
Using molecular phenotyping data collected from 3,000 patients over five years, we are discovering new biomarkers for assessing the risk of developing secondary breast cancer, breast cancer recurrence and how diet and lifestyle factors could influence the outcome of the disease.