Healx data scientist wins poster prize for finding new links between rare diseases
Erin Oerton, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge and data scientist at Healx, has won the poster prize for the Systems Medicine track at the 2nd Interdisciplinary Signalling Workshop in Visegrad, Hungary. Erin presented a poster showing how integrating bioinformatic data highlights novel links between rare diseases, such as between inflammatory bowel disease and common skin disorders, which are also enriched for shared drugs.
Erin is researching the ways in which we can make connections between diseases using gene expression and other bioinformatic data. Together with Healx scientists, she is investigating how data integration – the combination of different types of data such as genetic variant data or literature co-occurrence – can aid our understanding of disease and help to identify opportunities for drug repurposing.
What can integration of bioinformatic data tell us about disease relationships?