Professor Michael Barnes

Profile

Michael co-leads the Centre for Translational Bioinformatics (C4TB), at Queen Mary University of London and is a Fellow of the Digitial Environment Research Institute, QMUL. His team work across diverse research areas, including genomics, drug discovery, stratified medicine, machine learning and health informatics with a unified objective to drive forward translation into the clinic. He brings an industrial perspective to the C4TB, drawn from 16 years of leadership of bioinformatics teams in the pharmaceutical industry.

Michael is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and an HDR-UK Investigator, and co-leads the Genomics England Stratified medicine genomic interpretation clinical partnership. He has an active portfolio of stratified medicine projects as a co-investigator and data integration lead on several MRC projects, including MRC PSORT (Psoriasis), MRC RA-Map (RA), MRC MATURA (RA), and CLUSTER (Juvenile Arthritis). He also co-leads the NIHR AI-Multiply Consortium which is using AI to investigate the relationship between multiple long-term conditions and polypharmacy. He has served on the MRC Methodology Research Panel and Stratified Medicine panels and also advises on a number of project boards, including the UnitedHealth Group Pharmacogenetics advisory group, the Dutch Heart Foundation, the MRC-eMedLab HPC Cloud facility, the IMI etriks project, and the F1000 faculty. 

Research

Publications

• Leong IUS, Cabrera CP, Cipriani V et al. (2024). Large-Scale Pharmacogenomics Analysis of Patients With Cancer Within the 100,000 Genomes Project Combining Whole-Genome Sequencing and Medical Records to Inform Clinical Practice..

  
  

  DOI: 10.1200/jco.23.02761

  
  

  QMRO:
• Wenteler A, Cabrera CP, Wei W et al. (2024). AI approaches for the discovery and validation of drug targets.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1017/pcm.2024.4

  
  

  QMRO: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/100334
• Henkin R, Goldmann K, Lewis M et al. (2024). shinyExprPortal: a configurable ‘shiny’ portal for sharing analysis of molecular expression data.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae172

  
  

  QMRO: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/99464
• Shoop-Worrall SJW, Lawson-Tovey S, Wedderburn LR et al. (2024). Towards stratified treatment of JIA: machine learning identifies subtypes in response to methotrexate from four UK cohorts.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1016/j.ebiom.2023.104946

  
  

  QMRO: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/100783
• Calero-Díaz H, Hamad RA, Atallah C et al. (2023). Interpretable and robust hospital readmission predictions from Electronic Health Records. 2023 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)

  
  

  DOI: 10.1109/bigdata59044.2023.10386820

  
  

  QMRO:
• Goldmann K, Spiliopoulou A, Iakovliev A et al. (2024). Expression quantitative trait loci analysis in rheumatoid arthritis identifies tissue specific variants associated with severity and outcome.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1136/ard-2023-224540

  
  

  QMRO: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/91722
• Eto F, Samuel M, Henkin R et al. . Ethnic differences in early onset multimorbidity and associations with health service use, long-term prescribing, years of life lost, and mortality: A cross-sectional study using clustering in the UK Clinical Practice Research Datalink.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1004300

  
  

  QMRO: https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/93337
• Beesley R, Feilding FL, Beesley R et al. (2024). Development and implementation of ‘A guide to PPIE – Early Integration into Research Proposals’ in a multi-disciplinary consortium.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1093/rheumatology/kead482

  
  

  QMRO:
• Ng S, Masarone S, Watson D et al. (2023). The benefits and pitfalls of machine learning for biomarker discovery.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1007/s00441-023-03816-z

  
  

  QMRO:
• Lawson-Tovey S, Smith SL, Geifman N et al. . The successes and challenges of harmonising juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) datasets to create a large-scale JIA data resource.

  
  

  DOI: 10.1186/s12969-023-00839-2

  
  

  QMRO:

Collaborators

Internal

• Prof Mark Caulfield (WHRI)
• Prof Costantino Pitzalis (WHRI)
• Prof Leo Dunkel (WHRI)
• Prof Patricia Munroe (WHRI)
• Prof David Kelsell (Blizard)
• Prof Amrita Ahluwalia (WHRI)
• Prof Karim Brohi (Blizard)
• Prof David Van Heel (Blizard)
• Prof Silvia Marino (Blizard)
• Prof Sussan Nourshagh (WHRI)
• Prof Rupert Pearse (WHRI)
• Prof Steffen Petersen (WHRI)
• Prof Adam Timmis (WHRI)
• Dr Michael O'Dwyer (WHRI)
• Dr Myles Lewis (WHRI)

External

• Prof Nick Reynolds (Newcastle)
• Prof John Issacs (Newcastle)
• Prof Christopher Griffiths (Manchester)
• Prof Ann Morgan (Leeds)
• Prof Folkert Asselbergs (UCL)
• Dr Brendan Keating (UPENN)
• Prof Jo Knight (Lancaster)
• Dr Michael Weale (KCL)
• Dr Gerome Breen (Institute of Psychiatry, KCL)
• Prof Gerhard Ecker (University of Vienna)