Why INT2ACT?
RNA therapeutics is one of the most promising areas of biomedicine today. INT2ACT brings together diverse leading researchers to focus on bringing RNA therapeutics to the clinic.
Prof. Rory Johnson
Supervisor of DC11
Prof. Rory Johnson is an Associate Professor at the University College Dublin in Ireland.
The Laboratory for Genomics of Long Noncoding RNA and Disease (GOLD Lab) is an interdisciplinary group of experimental and computational researchers who seek to unlock the potential of the non-protein coding regulatory genome to develop new medicines. Their core expertise is in harnessing the power of genome editing to hunt for new targets for RNA therapeutics. They contribute actively to several important international consortia, including GENCODE (the human and mouse gene annotation project) and FANTOM (Functional Annotation of the Mammalian Transcriptome).
My original background is in physics, however I got a taste for molecular biology during my undergraduate degree and have followed that passion ever since. During my PhD, I became fascinated with the mysterious ‘Dark Genome’, which at that time was largely unexplored and ignored. In the intervening years I have dedicated my research to mapping novel non-protein-coding genes and understanding their function. Now, I am trying to harness that knowledge and experience to develop new generations of RNA therapies.
I studied Physics at Imperial College. Aftere a Wellcome Trust PhD at the University of Leeds in Molecular Neurobiology, I headed to the Genome Institute of Singapore to learn next generation sequencing and bioinformatics. For 6 years I was Staff Scientist and Ramon y Cajal fellow at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (Barcelona), before starting my own lab as a Junior Group Leader with the Swiss National Centre for RNA & Disease. Finally I moved to University College Dublin in 2020 with a Future Research Leaders award.