Lude Franke awarded ERC grant of €1.5m

New ‘big data’ approach to identify environmental risk factors for disease

Lude Franke (Department of Genetics, UMCG) has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant (€1,500,000) to identify new environmental risk factors for immune diseases. Many diseases have a genetic background but other environmental risk factors (such as viral or bacterial infections) must also play an important role. However, for most diseases these environmental risk factors are still unknown. In this project Lude Franke will identify these risk factors by using large amounts of genetic and gene expression data to study the interplay between genetic risk factors, the role of different bacteria and viruses, and their joint effects on disrupted cells, genes and pathways. He will develop new statistical and computational methods and will apply these to RNA-sequencing data from gene expression measurements on single cells.

See more about his work at www.systemsgenetics.nl and here