CARTaGENE: from human genetics to environmental health
During the CRCHUM Conference interaxes on Friday, October 14, Vikki Ho and Guillaume Lettre, co-scientific directors of CARTaGENE (CaG), will talk about projects using CaG data.
The conference will be broadcast from the CRCHUM amphitheatre (R05.212A and R05 212B) on Friday, October 14 from noon to 1:00 p.m. It will also be offered in hybrid mode at the following link, you must register in advance to access it.
The CARTaGENE (CaG) study is the largest ongoing prospective health study of 43 000 men and women in Quebec. It is a public research platform with a vast amount of data collected on health, nutrition, environment and lifestyle, along with physical measurements and more than 30 000 stored biological samples that are accessible to the scientific community for health research. This presentation will highlight the diversity of projects using CaG data, from the creation of polygenic risk scores for coronary artery disease to the role of occupational exposures in lung cancer etiology.
About the speakers
Vikki Ho, PhD, is a principal scientist at the CRCHUM in the Health innovation and evaluation hub research theme. She is an Associate Professor of epidemiology at the Université de Montréal, School of Public Health since 2016.
She holds a Chair from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in Sex and Gender Science in Cancer Research. She obtained her PhD in epidemiology from Queen’s University, Canada, in 2014.
Her research program is focussed in elucidating the role of environmental factors in cancer etiology and is organized in three themes:
- Identifying modifiable risk factors for cancer prevention – a focus on the occupational environment;
- A molecular epidemiologic approach to investigating environment-cancer relationships;
- The exposome approach to elucidating the role of the environment on health.
Guillaume Lettre, PhD, is a Professor of Medicine at the Montreal Heart Institute and the Université de Montréal since January 2009.
He holds a Canada Research Chair since 2010 and is a member od the College of the Royal Society of Canada since 2019. He obtained his PhD in Developmental Genetics from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in 2005.
His lab is interested in the genetics of complex traits and common diseases in humans. He aims to identify genetic variation that influences cardiovascular and hematological disease risk using high-throughput DNA genotyping and sequencing technologies, together with state-of-the-art computational and bioinformatics approaches.
He is also combining genetic discoveries with functional characterization largely based on genome editing methods (e.g. CRISPR/Cas9) to gain molecular and mechanistic insights into disease pathophysiology.
Vikki Ho and Guillaume Lettre are the guests of Lise Gauvin, Health innovation and evaluation hub research them.
