Dr Matt Hurles, Scientific Director at Congenica, has recently been elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences; an independent UK body that promotes and supports medical research. The Academy directly engages with the public by providing research experts with a platform to communicate their expertise.

To add to these successes, earlier this year Matt was also appointed as the new Head of the Human Genetics Programme at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. This world-class programme consists of multiple research groups connected through the common goal of utilising population-scale datasets not only discover novel genetic loci but also to inform our mechanistic understanding of human health and disease. Matt first joined the Institute in 2003 as a member of the scientific faculty.

These two recent appointments are the latest in a long line of accolades for Matt; throughout his career he has also been awarded the Balfour Lecture by the Genetics Society and the Crick Lecture by the Royal Society, both in acknowledgement of Matt’s central role in the advancement of human genetics.

Building on his wealth of knowledge and experience, Matt is one of the co-founders of Congenica. With the ever-increasing numbers of disease-causing genetic variants continually being discovered from projects such as the DDD, the bottleneck to translating genomics in the clinic now lies at the variant interpretation stage. Congenica’s Sapientia is the platform of choice for a number of high profile projects including the 100K Genomes Project, that can rapidly assimilate genetic sequence data and clinical information (patient phenotypes) to generate a prioritised list of variants that are likely causes of disease and can therefore be utilised in a clinical diagnostic setting.

Listen to Matt’s Francis Crick lecture here and read the full version of this news story.