Visit from Faisalabad in Pakistan

From June 25th until July 2nd Prof. Shahid Baig, Professor of Human Molecular Genetics and Head of the Health Biotechnology Division at NIGBE in Faisalabad, visited us. 
For several years now we collaborate sucessfully on the genetics of cardiovascular diseases (CVD).

Altogether more than 35 families with a broad spectrum of CVD were recruited and about 15 of these families have been exome-sequenced. In about half of the families we were able to nail down the most likely pathogenic variant.

Family studies and functional assays will help to finally unravel the genetics in these families.
This collaboration has been started through the primary contact between Ilyas and Prof. Baig. Over the last years we were getting more and more close because Prof. Baig and me co-supervise two very promising PhD students, Shafaq and Noor. In addition, we plan to further strengthen our close collaboration by applying for joint funding.

   

This past week was fully packed with several meetings, attending the NCCR retreat, and a talk from Prof. Baig about: "State of the recessive disorders in a population practicing consanguineous marriages" at our institute.

Prof. Baig showed impressingly the consequences of consanguineous marriages on disease frequencies, for example for ß-thallesemia or microcephaly. And he could show the high sucess rate of unravelling the genetics in some of these extended families in the last years. Some exemplary publications are PMID: 28892560, PMID: 28685811, PMID: 31036918, PMID: 30609410, PMID: 30892110.
Yesterday evening we met with Shafaq, Ilyas and Prof. Baig for Dinner and we had vivid discussions about the live in Pakistan and Germany. It is so important to talk to each other and to learn about the hurdles in live under different conditions. 

I´m looking forward to the next visit in 2020!
JE