Professor Sir John Bell delivers MSc Genomic Medicine Plenary Lecture

Professor Sir John Bell visited Imperial College London to give a talk to our new postgraduate students at the National Heart and Lung Institute.

We were delighted to welcome Professor Bell to talk to us about the future of genomic medicine, with his lecture entitled ‘How genomic medicine is shaping 21st century healthcare’.

Professor Sir John Bell is the Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, and the Chairman of the Office for the Strategic Coordination of Health Research. Professor Bell has led UK  and worldwide initiatives in genetics and genomics research, and was a founder of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford. Due to his expertise in clinical research Professor Bell also has advisory roles in the field of global health, and is Chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Scientific Advisory Committee and is a non-Executive Director of Genomics England.

Professor Sir John Bell's lecture was inspiring and showed us the role the UK has played in genomics, and demonstrated how this research is playing a role in current clinical practice Dr Tala Andoni MSc student

The lecture covered a wide range of potential applications of genomic medicine in healthcare for the students to consider. Professor Bell spoke about the potential impact of genomic medicine in public health, infectious disease, cancer, and cardiology.  Professor Bell explained how genomics was used to discover why populations of the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum in Western Cambodia may have developed resistance to clinical treatment so rapidly. Research involving international collaborations uncovered the reason these P. falciparum populations had such a high level of sequence variation, they had errors in their DNA mismatch repair pathways. The study revealed that these errors can facilitate the rapid evolution of treatment-resistant populations of P. falciparum in Cambodia. This new data is being used in attempts to combat the spread of treatment-resistant P.falciparum in this region.

The lecture ended on an inspirational note with Professor Bell emphasising what an exciting time it is to be in the field of genomic medicine in the UK, during an era in which large-scale next-generation DNA sequencing projects such as the 100,000 Genomes Project, are returning clinically actionable results to patients within the NHS. 

As the Teaching Fellow for the MSc in Genomic Medicine I was pleased that our students got the chance to hear from such an influential researcher in the field. The opportunity to hear from experts about their research in the field of genomic medicine at Imperial College London, partner hospitals and other collaborators enhances the student learning experience. One of our students Dr Tala Andoni commented, ‘Professor Sir John Bell's lecture was inspiring and showed us the role the UK has played in genomics, and demonstrated how this research is playing a role in current clinical practice’.