Dr. Hon-Cheong So, School of Biomedical Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hongkong, China
Biograph: Dr. Hon-Cheong So is a physician-scientist and his main research focus is on the development and application of novel statistical and computational methods in the analysis of "omics" and clinical data, with an overarching goal of translating omics data into clinical practice. He has developed novel methods to decipher the genetic architecture of complex diseases and to predict disease risks based on genomic profile and family history, and recently also worked on bioinformatics approaches to drug discovery and repositioning. He is experienced in the analysis of large-scale genomics data and he is also a member of the Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium. He has strong interests in neuropsychiatric disorders, but also work on other disease areas such as cardiometabolic diseases. His work has been published in leading journals in the field such as Nature Neuroscience, Bioinformatics, Psychological Medicine, The American journal of human genetics and others.

Speech Title: Translating genomics data into clinical practice: computational approaches to drug repurposing

Abstract: The time and cost for novel drug discovery is ever-increasing. Drug repurposing, i.e. using existing drugs for new therapeutic indications, represents a cost-effective approach to speed up drug development. With increased availability of large-scale "omics" data such as those from genome-wide association studies, computational methods might play a more important role in drug discovery or repurposing. Here we will present our recent works on computational drug repurposing. We shall present an approach for repositioning leveraging imputed expression profiles from genome-wide association data and drug transcriptomes. We also propose another framework based on the principles of gene-set analysis. We also introduce methods to perform disease subtyping and patient stratification, such as drugs can be developed towards more targeted patient groups. We focus our applications on psychiatric disorders since few repositioning studies were targeted towards these disorders, although the methods are generally applicable to other complex diseases. We found that the above methods successfully "re-discovered" known drugs for the studied diseases and revealed novel repositioning candidates that are supported by the literature.