The Chronomic Medicine group is based in the Department of Medical Genetics at the University of Cambridge and collaborates with colleagues across multiple departments.
Our goal is to investigate how chronobiology impacts human health and disease. We are especially interested in the usage of chronobiology in genomic medicine; for which we have coined the term “Chronomic Medicine”. We utilise genomics, transcriptomics and epigenomics to make comparisons between systems.
What is Chronomic Medicine?
The importance of circadian medicine for human health is rapidly becoming apparent. Humans have an intrinsic circadian clock that synchronises physiology with the external environment and controls the expression of up to 40% of protein coding genes. Most clinical advances have been focussed on drug dosing and chronotherapeutics which have been the traditional research areas for human chronobiologists. However, as 52% of disease causing genes are predicted to oscillate across the course of a day there is an unexplored potential for the role of the circadian clock in the study and treatment of rare disease, as well as health, and the contribution to variable phenotypes.
Chronobiology is the study of biological time time. We are interested in daily and seasonal time keeping mechanisms – circadian and photoperiodic oscillators. We are using the tools of genomic medicine to cement the idea of Chronomic Medicine – delivering mechanistic basis for the role of the circadian clock in the inheritance and phenotypes of rare disease and answering the community wide call to explore all potential aspects of circadian medicine.
The tiers of variant discovery for chronomic medicine. Contributions may be found from: i) Variants underlying chronotype, ii) variants in clock genes, iii) variants in cis-element binding sites for clock genes in promoters of rhythmic genes e.g. SCN5A.
The lead involvement of the principal investigator (PI) in the Cambridge Genomic Medicine Programme (CGMP) gives a unique opportunity to realise this call. We look forward to working with any clinicians who want to partner with us.
We take several Masters students from the Cambridge Genomic Medicine Programme MPhil and MSt cohorts each year. Please get in touch to discuss a potential project.
Chronomic Medicine Group 