Speaker: Professor Paul Skipp - University of Southampton: Centre for Proteomic Research, Southampton, United Kingdom

Abstract: Asthma is characterised by heterogeneous clinical phenotypes of varying severity and differing disease mechanisms. Improved understanding of serve asthma through identification of distinct groups of asthmatics (phenotypes) can help to decide which treatments may be most effective in which group of patients and predict long term outcomes. Here we present results from the U-BIOPRED consortium that improves our understanding of severe asthma, identifying distinct sub-phenotypes of asthmatics through an integration of clinical and multi-‘omics approaches and application of Topological Data Analysis (TDA). We also present a novel concept in Precision Medicine -TopMD. Diagnostics and prognostics based upon discrete biomarkers, or panels of discrete biomarkers are subject to variability in technical measurement, cohorts and individuals. The artificial intelligence platform TopMD measures the similarity in shape of molecular expression data relative to biological pathways providing robust diagnostics compared to today’s discrete molecular biomarkers, bringing improved accuracy, speed and robustness in phenotype classification.

Speaker profile: Paul J. Skipp is Professor of Proteomics at the University of Southampton and Director of the Centre for Proteomic Research. His group address a wide range of complex biological problems publishing over 90 research articles spanning the areas of clinical ‘omics, microbial proteomics, immunopeptidomics, systems biology and integrative methods for biomarker discovery. He is also co-founder and Director of TopMD, a pathway biomarker company providing a new data-driven technology to advance precision medicine and the discovery of new biomarkers.