Mina Ryten

Publications

Latest publications of Mina Ryten available on ResearchGate.

Research Interests

Transcriptomics; Data Analysis of High-throughput Techniques for complex neurological diseases; Data Analysis of High-throughput Techniques to improve the diagnostic yield for rare neurogenetic disorders

Biography

Professor Mina Ryten is a clinician scientist with a long-standing interest in using human brain transcriptomics to understand neurological diseases. Mina began her medical training at Cambridge University and completed an MB PhD at UCL. While her PhD focused on purinergic signalling in skeletal muscle development, she subsequently trained in bioinformatics through an MRC Post-doctoral Fellowship in Systems Biology. This experience led her to become a Clinical Geneticist, shaped her research interests and formed the basis of her application for an MRC Clinician Scientist Fellowship. Since 2017 Mina has led her own research group at the UCL Institute of Neurology, and later the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. She also worked as an Honorary Consultant in Clinical Genetics at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and Guy’s Hospital. During her clinical practice, she cared for individuals and families with - or at risk of - a range of conditions with a potential genetic basis, helping them to get a diagnosis and to live their lives as normally as possible with their condition. In January 2024 Mina’s lab moved to Cambridge University, where she became the Director of the UK DRI at Cambridge. At the core of her group’s research is using human brain transcriptomic data as a genome-wide functional read-out of an individual’s DNA, which can inform our understanding of the genetic origins of neurodegenerative diseases. In the context of rare neurogenetic diseases, this has meant using correlations in transcriptomic data to identify hidden gene-to-gene relationships amongst Mendelian genes. In the context of complex neurological diseases, this has meant to generate and use regulatory data across the human brain to link disease risk positions to specific genes. Thus, over the last ten years, she has developed extensive expertise in generating and using human brain transcriptomic data with a specific focus on neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Lewy body disorders.