SMARTbiomed Annual Symposium 2026
On Thursday, June 18th, the second annual SMARTbiomed symposium was held in Aarhus, Denmark.
Director Naomi Wray’s opening speech clearly outlined the main direction of our work: The Pioneer Centre is focused on methodology, its strength is in working towards solutions to further understanding of common and complex diseases– that is, where our expertise in finding good answers to complicated questions can end up helping a lot of people – and we build that strength through focusing on cooperation (across disciplines and geographies) and through training the next generation of researchers with the tools to tackle these challenges.
For these reasons, Professor Wray argued, being based in Denmark – with its state-of-the-art CPR Registry – and the UK – with its wealth of biobank data – is the perfect collaborative space for the Pioneer Centre. And, as most of the rest of the day’s agenda were talks by early-career researchers from within SMARTbiomed, on a host of different topics, it was clear that the emphasis on training the next generation of researchers is already paying off. In particular, new collaborations have been established across expertise domains which are starting to deliver on the promise that SMARTbiomed should be more than the sum of the parts.
Elena Sabbioni, a SMARTbiomed Fellow from University of Oxford, gave in her presentation a great example of working with big data to uncover complex genetic connections, as well as some of the challenges this involved. Building a better understanding of pleiotropy — the cases where one gene may influence a multitude of traits — can be approached from the perspective of factorizing the variance and covariance matrix of the traits in question, reducing the phenome to a few factors or dimensions, and grouping traits by the dimensions they are related to. A promising metabolomics experiment with data from the UK Biobank seemed to indicate that a web of more than a hundred different metabolites could be described accurately using only around fifteen factors.
Moh Sallam, a SMARTbiomed Fellow from Aarhus University, presented on “shared genetic signals across phenotypes”. Can working with big biobank data sets help us answer questions like, “where in the genome are disease-associated signals ‘located’?”, “Which signals are ‘local’ to particular genomic regions, and which are distributed ‘globally’ across the genome?”, and “What is the overlap between genetic versus phenotypic similarity between diseases?”
The keynote talk of the day was by guest speaker Tine Jess, Director of the National Centre of Excellence for Molecular Prediction of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. The multi-pronged approach of her Centre to generate many data types and apply many methodologies in analysis to answer questions about a single disease group provided deep inspiration for SMARTbiomed researchers whose primary focus is developing methods that can be applied across diseases.
Bjarni Vilhjálmsson, co-director of the Pioneer Centre and recently-instated director of the National Centre for Registry-Based Research (NCRR) in Aarhus, gave the closing remarks for the day by highlighting several other interesting presentations by SMARTbiomed Fellows Nikki Hubers and Ciarrah-Jane Shannon Berry, and the good work of our coordinators and in particular our software coordinator, Michael Sachs, and how the breadth of topics and the increased symposium size itself was a promising proof that the Centre, that had already been off to a good start at its first annual symposium last year, was really growing into its strength and showing a lot of potential for further growth, with many exciting projects and collaborations to come.