Professor Sir Peter Donnelly is a Founder and CEO of Genomics Ltd and Emeritus Professor of Statistical Science at the University of Oxford, where he was latterly Director of the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics from 2007-2017, and before that Head of Department of the Department of Statistics from 1996-2001.
Peter has played central roles in the major national and international human genetics projects of the last 20 years, including the International HapMap project and the landmark Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium (WTCCC) which he led, along with its successor WTCCC2, a large international collaboration studying the genetic basis of more than 20 common human diseases and conditions in over 60,000 people. He also led the genotyping of UK Biobank. His other substantive academic contributions are in mathematical and population genetics, including the development of coalescent theory, and in understanding meiotic recombination.
In 2014, along with three colleagues, Peter founded Genomics, becoming the Company’s CEO in 2017. Genomics is a science-led transatlantic TechBio combining large-scale genetic and health data with proprietary analytics to accelerate drug discovery and advance predictive, preventative healthcare. It employs over 150 people across Oxford, Cambridge and London in the UK, and Cambridge and Research Triangle Park in the US. Genomics featured in the Sunday Times 100 Tech 2025 as one of the UK’s fastest-growing private tech companies and was recently named as one of Newsweek’s ”UK’s 100 most loved workplaces”.
Peter has received numerous awards for his research, including lifetime achievement awards from the Genetics Society and the American Society of Human Genetics, and a knighthood in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to the understanding of human genetics in disease. His TED talk has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times and his academic papers cited over 100,000 times. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries.
Keynote talk:
Implementing Genomic Prevention: how genomics can power a new prevention-first agenda for healthcare
Polygenic risk scores (PRS) capture the genetic component of risk for all of the common human diseases. They are an important risk factor for virtually all these diseases. In some cases, especially for cancers, they capture the vast majority of the measurable risk. PRS can play a transformative role in making risk prediction in healthcare much more personalised and more powerful. In so doing, they allow health systems to much more efficiently get the right people into the right screening, prevention, and treatment programmes at the right time. PRS have now been widely validated for multiple diseases, including across diverse ancestry groups, and have begun to feature in clinical guidelines, both in Europe and the US. We will describe use cases in three areas: cardiovascular disease, obesity, and screening, including real-world and clinical trial evidence, and practical experience from deployment with healthcare providers. In the UK, the National Health Service has committed to rolling out polygenic risk scores across the country in the next decade.