Wenmin Zhang

Supervised by: Guillaume Lettre
Université de Montréal

Developing Responsible AI for Genetics-Guided Drug Target Discovery in Cardiovascular Diseases across Diverse Ancestries

The complex nature of cardiovascular diseases necessitates continuous innovation in the development of novel therapeutic strategies. Human genetics has emerged as a transformative tool for drug target discovery. However, non-European ancestry populations may not benefit from these discoveries due to underrepresentation in existing data resources. Therefore, I aim to develop and apply novel responsible AI methods for identifying causal genetic variants, based on multi-ancestral genome-wide association studies for cardiovascular diseases, and conduct genetics-guided causal inference to identify drug targets for cardiovascular diseases at the transcript, protein, or metabolite levels, focusing on populations of diverse ancestries.