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Tim Frayling

@timfrayling.bsky.social

Human genetics, type 2 diabetes and obesity in today's environment. Cycling uphill. Team science. New shoots in Geneva & France, long roots in the UK & Exeter. https://www.unige.ch/medecine/gede/en/research-groups/timothy-frayling

720 Followers  |  209 Following  |  173 Posts  |  Joined: 13.11.2024
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Posts by Tim Frayling (@timfrayling.bsky.social)

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#hiring #healthdata #sphn #datasharing #fair #personalizedmedicine #collaboration #swisshds #sparql #snomedct #loinc #semantics #ehds | Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) πŸ“’ We’re hiring: Senior Software Developer (permanent, 80–100%) πŸ“ Basel (hybrid work possible) To strengthen its semantic layer, Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) is seeking a Senior Software...

Fantastic opportunity en Suisse: www.linkedin.com/posts/swiss-...

25.02.2026 19:47 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Amazing. UK leading the way . Finland in silver medal position ? and I predict Switzerland could join them on the podium at some point over the next year or two

25.02.2026 19:42 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Disease progression and treatment response in data-driven subgroups of type 2 diabetes compared with models based on simple clinical features: an analysis using clinical trial data Research using data-driven cluster analysis has proposed five subgroups of diabetes with differences in diabetes progression and risk of complications…

& here's a very good example: "The proposed data-driven clusters differ in diabetes progression and treatment response, but models that are based on simple continuous clinical features are more useful to stratify patients" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

19.02.2026 08:22 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

yep. seems like we need to try, but also that most components of disease are on a continuous scale. Put people into groups based on those scales and they will look different, but are the separations real ? doesn't rule out the importance of stratification to get more bang for intervention buck

19.02.2026 08:18 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Spain approves decree to regularise half a million undocumented migrants Move affecting those who have been in Spain five months or more runs counter to anti-migration policies across Europe

Worth keeping an eye on Spain who seem to be going down a different, more evidenced based, route : www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...

12.02.2026 20:23 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Congratulations @laferrat.bsky.social & team.

12.02.2026 12:29 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Disease progression and treatment response in data-driven subgroups of type 2 diabetes compared with models based on simple clinical features: an analysis using clinical trial data Research using data-driven cluster analysis has proposed five subgroups of diabetes with differences in diabetes progression and risk of complications…

slightly random reminder of this paper from 2019 from Exeter colleagues that shows how heterogeneity of disease, in this case diabetes, is best dealt with by using continuous clinical variables not cluster assignment: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

11.02.2026 12:52 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
Senior Software developer About UsΒ The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) is a national network mandated by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) to enable the secure reuse of health data fo...

excellent opportunity with SPHN , making health data from > 10% of the Swiss population safely reusable for research apply.refline.ch/499599/0353/...

11.02.2026 10:12 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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🧬 New preprint alert! After years of collaborative work across 52 datasets we are presenting eQTLGen phase 2: a genome-wide eQTL meta-analysis covering 43,301 blood samples: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/8)

06.02.2026 10:14 β€” πŸ‘ 36    πŸ” 21    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 4
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Genetics identifies obesity as a shared risk factor for co-occurring multiple long-term conditions - Communications Medicine Mounier et al., analyse whether obesity, measured by body mass index (BMI) affects the shared genetic risk between 71 long-term health conditions including diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. Healt...

Using genetics to understand multi morbidity, including neat R package to "subtract" effects of critical risk factors such as obesity : www.nature.com/articles/s43...

07.02.2026 16:27 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

great work & just as interesting is use of this approach to estimate the shared genetics between pairs of conditions whilst "subtracting" the effects of obesity. Interesting that T2D-Osteoarthritis genetic link estimated as 100% about obesity, other pairs clearly have strong non obesity components

06.02.2026 15:49 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

The Exeter team seem to be the Alex Honnold of human genetics. Most sane people on seeing the challenge of meta analysing >1billion variants & 10,000s aggregates across ~100% of the genome would opt for the safety rope of the exome. Not these guys.

06.02.2026 15:46 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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#sphn #healthdata #datasharing #fair #personalizedmedicine #collaboration #swisshds #snomedct #loinc #semantics #ehds | Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) πŸ”“πŸ“Š Clinical data from 800,000 patients unlocked: Empowering health research with a large-scale, FAIR dataset from Switzerland πŸ‡¨πŸ‡­ Swiss Personalized Health Network is proud to have released the metad...

ten percent of the Swiss population: Medical meta data update: www.linkedin.com/posts/swiss-...

27.01.2026 16:16 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 1    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 1
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Learning more about the brilliance of the medical record data at the University Hospital Geneva. This plot, from pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34643542/ shows how medical informatics researchers have introduced , & clinicians passively adopted, a set list of phrases, reducing new free text.

14.01.2026 12:29 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Interesting development in ”non-personalised Medicine” from UK:
the government will reduce the current lower threshold at which Soft drink industry levy applies from 5g of total sugars per 100ml to 4.5g
& will remove the current exemption for milk-based drinks with added sugar

25.11.2025 12:44 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

Rarely in the entire history of science, has QC been a topic of such passion, importance and impact. If only the French and Americans had adopted such rigor when they messed up the design of that multi billion $ telescope because one was using the metric system, the other the imperial system.

08.11.2025 15:35 β€” πŸ‘ 6    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Genetic subtyping of obesity reveals biological insights into the uncoupling of adiposity from its cardiometabolic comorbidities - Nature Medicine Genotype-phenotype data from over 450,000 individuals was analyzed to discover 205 genomic loci where an allele associated with increase adiposity was associated with a lower cardiometabolic disease r...

the last one was a nice review from Hanieh Yaghootkar, this is the partitioned PRS paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

07.11.2025 09:48 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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When more is not worse: Genetic subtypes of obesity challenge conventional risk paradigms Emerging evidence challenges the view of obesity as a uniform metabolic risk. Spotlighting the recent Nature Medicine study by Chami et al. this piece discusses how β€œuncoupling” adiposity from its car...

Now a nice series of papers using genetics to "uncouple" excess adiposity from its adverse metabolic effects. Here for metabolic traits www.nature.com/articles/s42..., here including non metabolic traits elifesciences.org/articles/72452 & here using partitioned PRS www.nature.com/articles/s41...

07.11.2025 09:46 β€” πŸ‘ 10    πŸ” 3    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0
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Découvrez l'un de nos trois chercheurs, Lauric Ferrat de l'UNIGE, qui explique son projet primé par notre Prix 2025 sur l'optimisation et la rentabilitédu dépistage du diabète de type 1 en... Découvrez l'un de nos trois chercheurs, Lauric Ferrat de l'UNIGE, qui explique son projet primé par notre Prix 2025 sur l'optimisation et la rentabilitédu dépistage du diabète de type 1 en Suisse.

Nearly two years in for our new common disease genetics and genomics team at the University of Geneva. Already lots to be proud of. Here is Lauric talking about his award from the local Diabetes charity. fr.linkedin.com/posts/fondat...

26.10.2025 17:45 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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SPHN is a trusted partner between hospitals and private companies A new collaboration framework allows private partners to transform sensitive Swiss health data into actionable insights while preserving patient privacy. The first pilot project examines risk factors ...

I’m learning more and more about the extremely impressive Swiss personalised Health Network and the trusted research environment infrastructure that enables researchers to safely access & Analyse data from multiple hospitals in Switzerland www.sib.swiss/news/sphn-is...

26.10.2025 16:10 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Still buzzing from an incredible day at WiDS Belgium 2025 πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» ✨ ! Usually WiDS leaves me inspired by all the amazing women sharing their work on stage. This year, I had the chance to be on stage… | L... Still buzzing from an incredible day at WiDS Belgium 2025 πŸ‘©β€πŸ’» ✨ ! Usually WiDS leaves me inspired by all the amazing women sharing their work on stage. This year, I had the chance to be on stage myse...

Congratulations to our Liza Darrous for winning the women in data science award last week: Β tinyurl.com/lizaprize

30.09.2025 16:11 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Projects - SPHN Projects Implementation Projects The SPHN implementation projects aim at developing the core infrastructure which is required to make health-related data FAIR* at the national level. Using a top-down ...

For more details about the Swiss personalised Health Network and the safe way trained researchers can work with data from multiple hospitals : sphn.ch/network/proj...

08.09.2025 18:58 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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HDRS

thanks to @laraedw001.bsky.social for highlighting this micro.green-park.co.uk/hdrs/. I suggest whoever gets this position, pops over to Switzerland as the SPHN have achieved great things with consented data from 10% of the population available for study a few months after application & in a TRE

08.09.2025 18:56 β€” πŸ‘ 2    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

When you say "nobody" do you mean "nobody outside of your health care providers" ? your hospital will use your data all the time to help audit and improve their services ?

08.09.2025 18:45 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

smart work aged 8. but possibly redundant for 17 years time when birth rates in europe may be 0.1 per couple. Maybe aged 85 : lose large amount of money to pay for private social care ?

05.09.2025 14:58 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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US economy adds fewer jobs than expected in August, confirming slowdown After the previous month's release, Trump fired then-Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEntarfer.

Oh dear. Sad and presumably another lead statistician to be fired ? www.bbc.com/news/live/c5...

05.09.2025 14:53 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0

thanks Laura. Yes I think the 1st slide on PRS talks needs to be "do not compare PRS to clinical genetics, compare to the common, equally bad & equally good , stuff your doctor measures all the time to stratify you - LDLC, blood pressure, family history, ancestry and BMI" (to add to your age & sex)

01.09.2025 12:48 β€” πŸ‘ 1    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 0    πŸ“Œ 0
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Polygenic risk scores in cardiovascular risk prediction: A cohort study and modelling analyses Luanluan Sun and colleagues investigate whether adding polygenic risk scores to conventional risk factors of cardiovascular disease helps predict disease risk.

yes . I guess my slight air of frustration is that we have known for while that PRS are complementary to other risk factors e.g. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...

01.09.2025 12:43 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

the first one does not seem to be the right question.

30.08.2025 09:12 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0

great stuff but why compare with PRS ? I do not think anyone is suggesting we should use one and not the other ? Can we not have our PRS cake and eat the EHRs :-)

30.08.2025 09:11 β€” πŸ‘ 0    πŸ” 0    πŸ’¬ 1    πŸ“Œ 0