Samira Asgari

🎉Just learned that our proposal on how viral exposures shape lupus risk & heterogeneity will be funded by the Lupus Research Alliance's Innovation Award.

Grateful to @lupusresearch.bsky.social & to collaborators @alemedinarivera.bsky.social & Deshire Alpizar-Rodriguez for their energy & enthusiasm.

I’ve always been fascinated by how psychedelics can rewire the brain, and as new research starts to reveal the mechanisms behind it, the whole picture just gets even more interestig.

We cover some of these new discoveries in the latest issue of @mindshiftnews.bsky.social.

🍎 ❤️ 🗽

🎉 Grateful to have received one of the inaugural pilot awards from Mout Sinai Institute for Liver Research.

With this award, Dr. Michael Murray and my team will explore the role of somatic mutations in inflammatory liver diseases.

reports.mountsinai.org/article/live...

@sinaigenhealth.bsky.social

My lab is at #ashg2025 🧬🥳:

1- Platform talk & predoc finalist by Abhijith Biji: human genomics of infectious diseases

2- Lighting talk & poster by Ashley Richardson: somatic mutations underlying auto-inflammatory diseases

Looking forward to a few days of science & networking.

Biomedical sciences need more comprehensive disease risk models that assess all potential risk factors together. Our work contributes to this effort, showing the power of integrating social determinants of health into risk models for more equitable and accurate prediction.

What we found:
- Including social, behavioral & environmental context in disease risk models consistently improved prediction.
- Their contribution often outweighed polygenic risk.
- Genetic and non-genetic risks act largely additively (little interaction effect at the level we examined).

Then, using data from >170,000 All of Us biobank participants, we asked how adding these profiles changes disease risk prediction and modifies the impact of genetic risk.

First, we developed a scalable framework that distills hundreds of lifestyle, environmental, and social measures into clear, independent profiles that can be used to assess disease risk on their own or alongside genetic scores.

A Scalable Framework to Integrate Social Determinants of Health into Disease Risk Models using Biobank Survey Data Complex diseases are a major global health burden, yet our ability to predict who is at risk remains limited. Risk is shaped by both heritable factors and non-genetic environmental, behavioral, and so...

Preprint alert 📜: How do social, behavioral, and environmental factors combine with genetics to shape risk for common diseases?

In our new work, led by senior bioinformatician Jane Brown, we sought to answer this question.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

If you are @cellpress.bsky.social #CSPrecisionGen25 conference don’t miss the talk by my brilliant PhD student Abhijith Biji. He will share our latest findings on human genomics study of 99 infectious disease phenotypes in ~800k individuals.

While these are initial findings from a small cohort, they suggest that diversity in lifetime viral exposures may be an underappreciated factor influencing individual variability in responses to infections, vaccines, and inflammatory triggers.

Additionally, we observed a measurable imprint on future innate cytokine production after past infection with viruses such as HSV-1 and HSV-2.

What we found:
Strong protein-level immunodominance to viral surface proteins.
Striking individual variability at the epitope level (even within the same proteins)

To link past viral infections with future innate immune responses, we combined VirScan (which measures antibody responses to past viral infections), with Olink proteomics after ex vivo TLR stimulation of blood samples.

Preprint alert📜: How do lifetime viral exposures shape our immune system response to future infections? 🦠🧬

We explore this question in our new preprint, led by postdoc
Chad Hogan.

biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

#SystemsImmunology #Immunology #Virology #Infection #HostResponse

Another two weeks, another MindShift issue; this one packed with updates on advancing clinical trials and new opportunities for psychedelics beyond the Global North.

Starting the academic year with a trip to Yale. Looking forward to sharing how large biobanks and real-world data are reshaping our understanding of infectious disease genomics, and to the conversations ahead!

Congrats to @ashleyrichardson.bsky.social from the lab of @samiraasgari.bsky.social for being selected to give a lightning talk and poster presentation at #ASHG2025 on her work exploring the role of somatic mutations in Biobank-scale data as a cause of inborn errors of immunity!

#GenomicHealth

🤩What a nice surprise to see @mindshiftnews.bsky.social mentioned by @jeanabbiateci.bsky.social, seasoned journalist and founder of the award-winning newsletter bulletin.fr.

Curious? Read our latest issue: bit.ly/4oCg22F
Want to support us? Subscribe (free, ad-free): mindshift.news/subscribe

While sepsis is our starting point, our broader goal is to apply this whole-human, multi-omic lens to other infectious and immune-mediated diseases.

Our immune response is shaped by inherited variants, somatic mutations, cell- and tissue-specific functions, environmental exposures, and social and behavioral factors. This award will allow us to study how these layers interact.

Lab news 🎉 We’ve received a 5-year, $2.3M award from NIH/NIGMS to leverage large-scale biobanks and build a data-driven approach to understanding sepsis biology and risk.

I just learned that Americans call some chalky, non-chocolatey!, pale candies ‘Smarties’ 😱 and they have no idea what they’re missing. Europeans, you know what I mean.

Back in Boston for #FOGBoston and excited to share our latest work! Using #Genomics, clinical data, and #RealWorldEvidence from three large #Biobanks, we identified hundreds of novel genetic risk loci for #InfectiousDiseases. If you're around or want to chat, let’s connect!

SPC: a SPectral Component approach to address recent population structure in genomic analysis Population structure is a well-known confounder in statistical genetics, particularly in genome-wide association studies (GWAS), where it can lead to inflated test statistics and spurious associations...

📢 Just posted: Our preprint introducing SPC — Spectral Components — is now live on medRxiv!

Led by Dr. Ruhollah Shemirani and years in the making, this method offers a robust, scalable way to adjust for recent population structure in genomic analyses.
🔗 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

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@sinaigenhealth.bsky.social @sinaigenetics.bsky.social

Excited to be in beautiful Madison, visiting colleagues @uwmadison.bsky.social! I’ll be sharing our recent work using three large-scale biobanks to advance understanding of the human genomics of infectious diseases. Looking forward to a full day of science and fun!

I asked #ChatGPT: Based on my prompts so far, describe me in 20 words.

The answer: Data-driven, sharp-tongued scientist blending genomics, AI, and storytelling. Strategic thinker, clear writer, playful observer—always chasing impact, never fluff.

I think we're in a relationship.

To women who lead, inspire, mentor, break barriers, and lift others as they rise - thank you for shaping the future! 🥂💜

#WomenMentors #IWD #InternationalWomensDay

Many thanks to @NaturePortfolio for giving us an opportunity to acknowledge some of the women who inspire us.