Speakers

Ellen McDonagh, PhD, is the Translational Informatics Director of Open Targets and is Group Leader for the Open Targets Core Team at the EMBL-EBI. She oversees and develops the strategy for Open Targets open source resources and the informatics research programme, collaborating closely with both academic and industry partners to systematically identify and prioritise targets in a range of diseases to develop safer and more effective medicines. Prior to joining the Open Targets team, she was the Head of Curation and Pharmacogenomics at Genomics England/QMUL. She helped pioneer a crowdsourcing platform (PanelApp) for the expert review and curation of gene panels, which are used in genome interpretation for diagnosis of rare disease patients as part of the 100,000 Genomes Project, and now adopted by the NHSE Genomic Medicine Service and Australian Genomics. Ellen also led projects to expand the scope of information analysed in patient genomes. These included health-related additional findings, and evidence-based pharmacogenomics to support the prediction of drug responses to improve patient safety and therapeutic outcomes. Before joining Genomics England, she worked as a Scientific Curator at the Pharmacogenomics Knowledge Base (PharmGKB) at Stanford University. In this role, she produced clinical guidelines regarding therapeutic recommendations based on a patient’s genotype, provided critical assessment of evidence for gene-drug associations, and published genetically associated pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic pathways. She is on the Science and Industry Advisory Board (SIAB) for ELIXIR-UK and the Steering Committee for The UK Pharmacogenetics and Stratified Medicine Network. She is a member of the Royal Society of Biology.  

Her research interests include pharmacogenetics and understanding a patient's response to medicines in order to help prioritise new targets and build therapeutic hypotheses. She is also interested in understanding disease mechanisms, learning from the biology of both rare and common diseases to better stratify, diagnose and treat patients. She is keen to focus on diseases that are under-represented, rare or have not been successfully treated, as well as ensuring better representation of under-represented patient groups and ethnicities. She is a co-lead of a CZI-funded project to build digital twins for rare diseases and the UKRI MRC-NIHR funded Open Psychiatry Project.