Leveraging microbiology records in UK Biobank participants to investigate risk factors for infection
Summary

Infection is important both as a cause of communicable diseases and as an exposure predisposing to non-communicable diseases. Investigating disease risk is a focus of research in large cohorts like UK Biobank. This talk discusses progress in linking cohorts to microbiological health records in the UK Health Security Agency’s Second Generation Surveillance System (SGSS) to enhance infection research. Human genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and exposome-wide association studies (ExWAS) have revealed genetic and non-genetic risk factors for COVID-19 hospitalization, demonstrating the potential for discovery across a wider variety of pathogens. Preliminary work has used GWAS to show how SGSS record linkage improves over Hospital Episode Statistics for phenotyping diverse bacterial infections, both in terms of quantity and granularity of infection diagnoses. Future directions aim to build on this progress to facilitate discovery of infection-related risk factors for disease in UK Biobank and beyond.
Date: 6 October 2025, 13:00
Venue: Big Data Institute, Old Road Campus OX3 7LF
Venue Details: Seminar rooms
Speaker: Professor Daniel Wilson (University of Oxford)
Organiser: Professor Angela Brueggemann (Oxford Population Health)
Organiser contact email address: alison.lewis@ndph.ox.ac.uk
Part of: IDEU Infectious Disease Seminar Series
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Alison Lewis, Angela Brueggemann