Line Engelbrechtsen - University of Dundee, Scotland

PhD student Line Engelbrechtsen, Section of Metabolic Genetics, NNF Center for Basic Metabolic Research, University of Copenhagen, has received an exchange travel grant of 9.638 kr. for a visit to the research group of Professor Ewan Pearson, Division of Molecular and Clinical Medicine, University of Dundee, Scottland, for 4 weeks by the end of August 2017.  

Line Engelbrechtsen is working with data on type 2 diabetes patients from 4 Danish cohorts: The Diet, Cancer, Health cohort (n=6000), The DD2 cohort (n=3000), The Addition cohort (n=1500) and the CIMT cohort (n=500). In particular she is investigating the progression of type 2 diabetes based on initiation, type and intensification of anti-diabetic treatment by conducting genome-wide association analyses (GWAS) to identify genetic variants related to progression of type 2 diabetes. Her intension is to replicate the findings from their GWAS in the Scottish GODART cohort.

Professor Ewan Pearson has been working with the field of Pharmacogenetics durin greent years. His group has developed advanced analytical approaches to evaluate the effect of pharmacogenetic variants on disease progression. An exchange visit to his group would be a great opportunity to learn more about the techniques they use when dealing with advanced pharmacogenetic data. During the exchange visit, Line Engelbrechtsen will have access to and be able to replicate the finding from their Danish cohorts, in a phenotypically well-described cohort of type 2 diabets patients from Scotland (n=8000). Furthermore, she will collaborate on a large meta-analyis investigating the role of genetic variants in disease progression of type 2 diabetes. The exchange visit will therefore, not only provide her with new analytical skills and replication of her data, but will also result in several large international collaborative projects with Professor Ewan Pearson and his group as initiators.