PQG Student and Postdoc Seminar

Research Fellow in Medicine
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

With large biobanks connecting electronic health records with genetic sequencing, our understanding of the genetic architecture of time-to-event (TTE) traits such as age-of-onset, treatment response, and disease progression has grown. As a result, several genome-wide association study (GWAS) methods have been developed based on the TTE phenotypic generative model (PGM); however, all existing heritability methods still model a linear relationship between the trait and genetics. Here, we propose a new heritability method, COXMM, a COX proportional hazard Mixed Model designed to estimate the heritability of traits which follow a TTE PGM. We demonstrate the efficacy of COXMM for TTE heritability estimation, both in simulations and in the UK Biobank.