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Tim Frayling

@timfrayling.bsky.social
745 followers 210 following 183 posts

Human genetics, type 2 diabetes and obesity in today's environment. Cycling uphill. Team science. New shoots in Geneva & France, long roots in the UK & Exeter. www.unige.ch/medecine/gede/en/resea…

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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Are you one of the >150,000 people in Geneva who have signed a general consent to allow researchers to securely reuse your data for medical research ? See below to find out how your data and samples could be helping us understand disease www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
linkedin.com
#biohug #personalisedmedicine #translationalresearch | Faculty of Medicine - UNIGE
BioHUG Biobank: 10,000 DNA samples and counting! Launched in February 2025, BioHUG (UNIGE Faculty of Medicine & HUG) aims to collect 20,000 DNA samples by 2027 — a milestone that will place it among ...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Faites-vous partie des plus de 150 000 Genevois qui ont signé un consentement général autorisant les chercheurs à réutiliser vos données en toute sécurité à des fins de recherche médicale ? www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...
linkedin.com
#biohug #médecinepersonnalisée #recherchetranslationnelle | Faculty of Medicine - UNIGE
🧬 La biobanque BioHUG : déjà 10 000 échantillons d'ADN Créée en février 2025, BioHUG (Faculté de médecine UNIGE & HUG) vise à inclure 20 000 échantillons d'ADN d'ici à 2027 — seuil qui la placera par...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Its like the French football team. An embarrassing array of talent.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 17/06/2026
Messi, Haaland and Mbappé. 3 legends, 7 goals. No pressure on Christiano tonight.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
great Michel. My favourite is that the women in UK Biobank are slightly poorer than the men. Being female and being (a little) richer help you get in to the study :-)
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
I ask, because as with many questions about the nuances of French grammar, it often sparks an argument between French native speakers.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
Claude is helping me learn French . French native speakers would you get the grammar differences between these 2 phrases ?: "Hier matin, Sophie s'est coupée profondément en épluchant des légumes. Avant le déjeuner, ma fille s'est lavé soigneusement les mains.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
Update from Claude
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
Catch up on Switzerland's mature Trusted Research Environment for working with sensitive data , including from multiple hospitals across the country. thanks to the hard work of Owen Appleton Sabine Österle , Shubham Kapoor & many others. www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsnE...
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YouTube
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 07/03/2026
Learn about working securely with data from 10% of the Swiss population : 📚 The SPHN Federated Clinical Routine Dataset: 🗣 Referenten: Dr. Sabine Österle 📅 Wann: Dienstag, 10. März 2026, um 16:45 Uhr 📍 Wo: Online via Zoom: bit.ly/4e9p3Ka #SPHN
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Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
Fantastic opportunity en Suisse: www.linkedin.com/posts/swiss-...
linkedin.com
#hiring #healthdata #sphn #datasharing #fair #personalizedmedicine #collaboration #swisshds #sparql #snomedct #loinc #semantics #ehds | Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN)
📢 We’re hiring: Senior Software Developer (permanent, 80–100%) 📍 Basel (hybrid work possible) To strengthen its semantic layer, Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) is seeking a Senior Software...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 25/02/2026
Amazing. UK leading the way . Finland in silver medal position ? and I predict Switzerland could join them on the podium at some point over the next year or two
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
& here's a very good example: "The proposed data-driven clusters differ in diabetes progression and treatment response, but models that are based on simple continuous clinical features are more useful to stratify patients" www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Disease progression and treatment response in data-driven subgroups of type 2 diabetes compared with models based on simple clinical features: an analysis using clinical trial data
Research using data-driven cluster analysis has proposed five subgroups of diabetes with differences in diabetes progression and risk of complications…
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
yep. seems like we need to try, but also that most components of disease are on a continuous scale. Put people into groups based on those scales and they will look different, but are the separations real ? doesn't rule out the importance of stratification to get more bang for intervention buck
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Worth keeping an eye on Spain who seem to be going down a different, more evidenced based, route : www.theguardian.com/world/2026/j...
theguardian.com
Spain approves decree to regularise half a million undocumented migrants
Move affecting those who have been in Spain five months or more runs counter to anti-migration policies across Europe
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Congratulations @laferrat.bsky.social & team.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
slightly random reminder of this paper from 2019 from Exeter colleagues that shows how heterogeneity of disease, in this case diabetes, is best dealt with by using continuous clinical variables not cluster assignment: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
sciencedirect.com
Disease progression and treatment response in data-driven subgroups of type 2 diabetes compared with models based on simple clinical features: an analysis using clinical trial data
Research using data-driven cluster analysis has proposed five subgroups of diabetes with differences in diabetes progression and risk of complications…
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 11/02/2026
excellent opportunity with SPHN , making health data from > 10% of the Swiss population safely reusable for research apply.refline.ch/499599/0353/...
apply.refline.ch
Senior Software developer
About Us The Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN) is a national network mandated by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) to enable the secure reuse of health data fo...
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Reposted by Tim Frayling
Robert Warmerdam @robertwarmerdam.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
🧬 New preprint alert! After years of collaborative work across 52 datasets we are presenting eQTLGen phase 2: a genome-wide eQTL meta-analysis covering 43,301 blood samples: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.6... (1/8)
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 07/02/2026
Using genetics to understand multi morbidity, including neat R package to "subtract" effects of critical risk factors such as obesity : www.nature.com/articles/s43...
nature.com
Genetics identifies obesity as a shared risk factor for co-occurring multiple long-term conditions - Communications Medicine
Mounier et al., analyse whether obesity, measured by body mass index (BMI) affects the shared genetic risk between 71 long-term health conditions including diabetes, heart disease and arthritis. Healt...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
great work & just as interesting is use of this approach to estimate the shared genetics between pairs of conditions whilst "subtracting" the effects of obesity. Interesting that T2D-Osteoarthritis genetic link estimated as 100% about obesity, other pairs clearly have strong non obesity components
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
The Exeter team seem to be the Alex Honnold of human genetics. Most sane people on seeing the challenge of meta analysing >1billion variants & 10,000s aggregates across ~100% of the genome would opt for the safety rope of the exome. Not these guys.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
ten percent of the Swiss population: Medical meta data update: www.linkedin.com/posts/swiss-...
linkedin.com
#sphn #healthdata #datasharing #fair #personalizedmedicine #collaboration #swisshds #snomedct #loinc #semantics #ehds | Swiss Personalized Health Network (SPHN)
🔓📊 Clinical data from 800,000 patients unlocked: Empowering health research with a large-scale, FAIR dataset from Switzerland 🇨🇭 Swiss Personalized Health Network is proud to have released the metad...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
Learning more about the brilliance of the medical record data at the University Hospital Geneva. This plot, from pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34643542/ shows how medical informatics researchers have introduced , & clinicians passively adopted, a set list of phrases, reducing new free text.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 25/11/2025
Interesting development in ”non-personalised Medicine” from UK: the government will reduce the current lower threshold at which Soft drink industry levy applies from 5g of total sugars per 100ml to 4.5g & will remove the current exemption for milk-based drinks with added sugar
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 08/11/2025
Rarely in the entire history of science, has QC been a topic of such passion, importance and impact. If only the French and Americans had adopted such rigor when they messed up the design of that multi billion $ telescope because one was using the metric system, the other the imperial system.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
the last one was a nice review from Hanieh Yaghootkar, this is the partitioned PRS paper: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Genetic subtyping of obesity reveals biological insights into the uncoupling of adiposity from its cardiometabolic comorbidities - Nature Medicine
Genotype-phenotype data from over 450,000 individuals was analyzed to discover 205 genomic loci where an allele associated with increase adiposity was associated with a lower cardiometabolic disease r...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
Now a nice series of papers using genetics to "uncouple" excess adiposity from its adverse metabolic effects. Here for metabolic traits www.nature.com/articles/s42..., here including non metabolic traits elifesciences.org/articles/72452 & here using partitioned PRS www.nature.com/articles/s41...
cell.com
When more is not worse: Genetic subtypes of obesity challenge conventional risk paradigms
Emerging evidence challenges the view of obesity as a uniform metabolic risk. Spotlighting the recent Nature Medicine study by Chami et al. this piece discusses how “uncoupling” adiposity from its car...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
Nearly two years in for our new common disease genetics and genomics team at the University of Geneva. Already lots to be proud of. Here is Lauric talking about his award from the local Diabetes charity. fr.linkedin.com/posts/fondat...
fr.linkedin.com
Découvrez l'un de nos trois chercheurs, Lauric Ferrat de l'UNIGE, qui explique son projet primé par notre Prix 2025 sur l'optimisation et la rentabilitédu dépistage du diabète de type 1 en...
Découvrez l'un de nos trois chercheurs, Lauric Ferrat de l'UNIGE, qui explique son projet primé par notre Prix 2025 sur l'optimisation et la rentabilitédu dépistage du diabète de type 1 en Suisse.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 26/10/2025
I’m learning more and more about the extremely impressive Swiss personalised Health Network and the trusted research environment infrastructure that enables researchers to safely access & Analyse data from multiple hospitals in Switzerland www.sib.swiss/news/sphn-is...
sib.swiss
SPHN is a trusted partner between hospitals and private companies
A new collaboration framework allows private partners to transform sensitive Swiss health data into actionable insights while preserving patient privacy. The first pilot project examines risk factors ...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 30/09/2025
Congratulations to our Liza Darrous for winning the women in data science award last week:  tinyurl.com/lizaprize
tinyurl.com
Still buzzing from an incredible day at WiDS Belgium 2025 👩‍💻 ✨ ! Usually WiDS leaves me inspired by all the amazing women sharing their work on stage. This year, I had the chance to be on stage… | L...
Still buzzing from an incredible day at WiDS Belgium 2025 👩‍💻 ✨ ! Usually WiDS leaves me inspired by all the amazing women sharing their work on stage. This year, I had the chance to be on stage myse...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
For more details about the Swiss personalised Health Network and the safe way trained researchers can work with data from multiple hospitals : sphn.ch/network/proj...
sphn.ch
Projects - SPHN
Projects Implementation Projects The SPHN implementation projects aim at developing the core infrastructure which is required to make health-related data FAIR* at the national level. Using a top-down ...
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
thanks to @laraedw001.bsky.social for highlighting this micro.green-park.co.uk/hdrs/. I suggest whoever gets this position, pops over to Switzerland as the SPHN have achieved great things with consented data from 10% of the population available for study a few months after application & in a TRE
micro.green-park.co.uk
HDRS
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 08/09/2025
When you say "nobody" do you mean "nobody outside of your health care providers" ? your hospital will use your data all the time to help audit and improve their services ?
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
smart work aged 8. but possibly redundant for 17 years time when birth rates in europe may be 0.1 per couple. Maybe aged 85 : lose large amount of money to pay for private social care ?
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 05/09/2025
Oh dear. Sad and presumably another lead statistician to be fired ? www.bbc.com/news/live/c5...
bbc.com
US economy adds fewer jobs than expected in August, confirming slowdown
After the previous month's release, Trump fired then-Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEntarfer.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
thanks Laura. Yes I think the 1st slide on PRS talks needs to be "do not compare PRS to clinical genetics, compare to the common, equally bad & equally good , stuff your doctor measures all the time to stratify you - LDLC, blood pressure, family history, ancestry and BMI" (to add to your age & sex)
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 01/09/2025
yes . I guess my slight air of frustration is that we have known for while that PRS are complementary to other risk factors e.g. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine...
journals.plos.org
Polygenic risk scores in cardiovascular risk prediction: A cohort study and modelling analyses
Luanluan Sun and colleagues investigate whether adding polygenic risk scores to conventional risk factors of cardiovascular disease helps predict disease risk.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
the first one does not seem to be the right question.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 30/08/2025
great stuff but why compare with PRS ? I do not think anyone is suggesting we should use one and not the other ? Can we not have our PRS cake and eat the EHRs :-)
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 20/08/2025
Amazing study. A simple but important question affecting up to 50% of the population yet previously understudied . And an exemplar in the power of multi-modal data linkage. www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/news/...
bristol.ac.uk
2025: Periods and GCSE results | Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children | University of Bristol
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
Deadline 31/08. Join a friendly team in the heart of Europe. Build your research career in human genetics & genomics using data from millions of individuals to address important causes and consequences of disease. Apply here lnkd.in/dyZcgc-g More information on the team here: lnkd.in/dzZ2aU4Z
lnkd.in
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 18/08/2025
New position in Geneva jobs.unige.ch/www/wd_porta...
jobs.unige.ch
Maître assistant-e - Fonds National (6461)
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 08/08/2025
similar scenario for height. even though the common genetics is "saturated" the height range one person could be based on their PRS is very wide. (which is of course a separate argument compared to using PRS to stratify people)
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
nice summary thanks Andrea. I wonder if this challenge will become easier in a few years if and when clinicians inform a young adult patient they would like to "do" their genetics at the same time as their first blood pressure/FEV/LDL-cholesterol etc test.
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Reposted by Tim Frayling
fbm-unil.bsky.social @fbm-unil.bsky.social · 07/08/2025
Dirigée par @zkutalik.bsky.social et @rjhfmstr.bsky.social à la @fbm-unil.bsky.social, au @sib.swiss et à #unisanté, une nouvelle étude publiée dans @nature.com présente une méthode computationnelle innovante pour étudier ces effets liés à l’origine parentale. 🔗 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Parent-of-origin effects on complex traits in up to 236,781 individuals - Nature
A novel multistep strategy reveals how parent-of-origin effects shape complex traits in large-scale biobanks.
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 02/08/2025
Best of British : Black Sabbath’s Paranoid played by the Coldstream guards to commemorate Ozzy Osborne
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 01/08/2025
well done part I @erinltempleman.bsky.social
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
Does it even make sense to compare PGS to proteomic risk scores though ? one is a once in a lifetime assay that costs about $40. the other....is not. The most relevant comparison for proteomic scores is likely to be routine biochemistry ?
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Tim Frayling @timfrayling.bsky.social · 14/07/2025
The Pope Song by Tim Minchin would be a controversial choice
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