Seminar

BioBigData. What is it what can we do with it? Human disease and aging

Prof. Arcadi Navarro

As Big Data relevant to human health coming from -omics technologies accumulates globally, both researchers and clinicians face new challenges. Several initiatives are committed to accelerate research to advance knowledge and foster human health. This talk will have two parts. First, I will present one of such initiatives: the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA; see
https://ega-archive.org/) the largest service for permanent archiving and sharing of all types of personally identifiable genetic and phenotypic data resulting from biomedical research projects. In the second part of the talk I will provide an example of the power of sharing such Data. It will focus on human aging, a public health challenge and a fascinating scientific problem, showing that there are links between diseases such that genetic variants with harmful effects in old ages are tolerated provided they foster health at early ages. The study shows that comorbidity and senescence can have common genetic causes, with implications in therapeutic strategies.