Dr Jeffrey Barrett
Dr Barrett has been involved in the CTTV since its inception in 2014 and will begin his new role on 1 May 2015.
The CTTV, launched one year ago, uses genome-scale experiments and analysis to validate therapeutic targets and focus research into treatments for a wide range of human diseases, including cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and respiratory disease.
The CTTV is committed to sharing its data openly with the scientific community.
Dr Jeff Barrett, director, CTTV, expressed, "We've made amazing progress in the past ten years towards understanding the relationship between genetic variation and disease risk. The CTTV offers an unprecedented opportunity to apply that knowledge to a long-standing problem in drug discovery: how can we narrow the search for new therapeutic targets from the whole genome to the most promising individual genes?
"We are applying methods and technologies available on the Wellcome Genome Campus to help pharmaceutical researchers focus their detailed studies of biological mechanisms and improve their methods for designing effective medicines. The CTTV blends the pharmaceutical industry's sense of enterprise and motion, an academic style that gives questions the time and patience they need, and public data services to integrate many layers of knowledge. Open Data underpins everything, so that what we produce can ultimately benefit everyone."
Dr Barrett is currently a group leader at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, where his research group analyses genomic variation in thousands of individuals to identify genetic risk factors for disease.
Originally trained in physics, he was inspired to move into computational biology in Mark Daly's lab at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he developed the Haploview analysis software and joined the HapMap project.
