Approved research

Effective risk prediction and classification for complex diseases across global populations

Lay summary

WeGene (https://www.wegene.com/en/) is a personal genetic test company formed in 2014 in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. We are dedicated to providing consumer genetic testing and personalized healthcare services. SNP array and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) are our main products provide to customers which are mainly Chinese. With these powerful DNA test results, we can help users to better understand their ancestry, sports genes, nutrition and metabolism, health risk, genetic disease, drug guidelines, genetic characteristics, skin feature, mental trait and so on. In the developed world, the prevalence of late onset Alzheimer's disease continues to rise and is now the 6th leading cause of death. There are approximately 30 million people worldwide with Alzheimer's disease (AD) in 2015, among which over 10 million individuals live in China. While various risk factors including genetic mutations have been identified to be associated with AD, the cause of AD is still poorly understood, not to mention the treatments to stop or reverse the disease progression. We are cooperating with hospitals which focuses on AD and a cohort in WeGene's database is under preparation. We want to combine WeGene's database and UK Biobank data to develop genetic risk scores and other prediction algorithms for AD. We hope to find genes related to AD and investigate the underlying genetic architectures of AD between Caucasians and East Asian by taking use of the large sample size and breadth of phenotypic data. We anticipate that the result would facilitate our understanding about disease pathologies, and ultimately yield new strategies for AD prevention, diagnosis and treatment.