Lawrence Middleton

Lawrence Middleton

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Lawrence Middleton

Centre for Genomics Research, Discovery Sciences, BioPharmaceuticals R&D, AstraZeneca, Cambridge, UK

Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

3Years (2024-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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11 September 2024 in Nature Genetics
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
MGManik Garg
Manik Garg
MKMarcin Karpinski
Marcin Karpinski
DMDorota Matelska
Dorota Matelska
LMLawrence Middleton
Lawrence Middleton
OBOliver S. Burren
Oliver S. Burren
DVDimitrios Vitsios
Dimitrios Vitsios
The emergence of biobank-level datasets offers new opportunities to discover novel biomarkers and develop predictive algorithms for human disease. Here, we present an ensemble machine-learning framework (machine learning with phenotype associations, MILTON) utilizing a range of biomarkers to predict 3,213 diseases in the UK Biobank. Leveraging the UK Biobank’s longitudinal health record data, MILTON predicts incident disease cases undiagnosed at time of recruitment, largely outperforming available polygenic risk scores. We further demonstrate the utility of MILTON in augmenting genetic association analyses in a phenome-wide association study of 484,230 genome-sequenced samples, along with 46,327 samples with matched plasma proteomics data. This resulted in improved signals for 88 known (P < 1 × 10−8) gene–disease relationships alongside 182 gene–disease relationships that did not achieve genome-wide significance in the nonaugmented baseline cohorts. We validated these discoveries in the FinnGen biobank alongside two orthogonal machine-learning methods built for gene–disease prioritization. All extracted gene–disease associations and incident disease predictive biomarkers are publicly available (http://milton.public.cgr.astrazeneca.com).

10 May 2024 in Science Advances
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
LMLawrence Middleton
Lawrence Middleton
IMIoannis Melas
Ioannis Melas
Chirag VasavdaChirag Vasavda
Chirag Vasavda
ARArwa Raies
Arwa Raies
BRBenedek Rozemberczki
Benedek Rozemberczki
DVDimitrios Vitsios
Dimitrios Vitsios
The ongoing expansion of human genomic datasets propels therapeutic target identification; however, extracting gene-disease associations from gene annotations remains challenging. Here, we introduce Mantis-ML 2.0, a framework integrating AstraZeneca’s Biological Insights Knowledge Graph and numerous tabular datasets, to assess gene-disease probabilities throughout the phenome. We use graph neural networks, capturing the graph’s holistic structure, and train them on hundreds of balanced datasets via a robust semi-supervised learning framework to provide gene-disease probabilities across the human exome. Mantis-ML 2.0 incorporates natural language processing to automate disease-relevant feature selection for thousands of diseases. The enhanced models demonstrate a 6.9% average classification power boost, achieving a median receiver operating characteristic (ROC) area under curve (AUC) score of 0.90 across 5220 diseases from Human Phenotype Ontology, OpenTargets, and Genomics England. Notably, Mantis-ML 2.0 prioritizes associations from an independent UK Biobank phenome-wide association study (PheWAS), providing a stronger form of triaging and mitigating against underpowered PheWAS associations. Results are exposed through an interactive web resource.