IRR People: Kenny Baillie

How is your research addressing the problem?

We use genomics, which is a relatively new capability that humans have, to read the DNA code that makes all of us. Importantly for my work, it is the code that defines how your immune system responds to an infection. So, by comparing people who have a really severe infection to the rest of the population, we can learn what specific differences in that code are driving the severity of their infection.

Sometimes that helps us pinpoint specific molecules in the body that are actually driving the disease. Where we can do that, it's quite possible that we can find a new treatment - maybe a new drug, or an old drug from a different condition - to make it more likely that our patients will survive.

What's your greatest discovery?

Our biggest and luckiest finding happened within five months of the outbreak of Covid in the UK. In our genetic study of critically ill people, we observed that there was a change in the DNA sequence that was more common in patients who were critically ill. The specific position of that change pointed to a specific treatment, a drug called baricitinib, which we predicted would suppress the immune system and prevent it from damaging the patient's lungs. 

It was because of that finding that that drug, baricitinib, went into a large scale clinical trial and was found to be effective. It further reduced your chance of dying of Covid on top of other treatments that were already in use, so it probably saved thousands of lives worldwide before the end of the pandemic. That's the first time in human history that genomics has led directly to an effective new therapy for any infectious disease, but I think it proves the principle that we can do that. And, of course, our intention is now to tackle many more similar problems in the future.

Inaugural lecture

Professor Baillie will give an inaugural lecture on the 24 April, which is free and open to the public. Anyone is welcome to attend. Prof Baillie will give an illuminating overview of his contribution to their field, with the talk title: "How to test a drug that doesn't exist, for a disease you don't understand".

Modern life support enables us to keep people alive when their organs are failing to perform their most basic functions. But beneath the sophistication of the machines and treatments that prevent death, there is a fundamental problem: we simply don't understand the mechanisms causing critical illness. So finding new treatments for the underlying disease processes has been extremely difficult. This is a story of how DNA can help.

Your genome is a vast, written programme that defines everything about how your body works. We live in a gap in history between learning to read that code, and learning to really understand it. But even without understanding how the program works, we can use shortcuts to answer questions about disease. This inaugural lecture will describe Professor Baillie's application of genomics in critical care medicine, his discovery of one effective new treatment, and the realistic potential to find more.

About Professor Kenneth Baillie

Professor Kenneth Baillie a clinician–scientist whose career has transformed host genomics in infectious disease. He pioneered new machine-learning approaches to functional annotation and evidence synthesis, led open-source global preparations for outbreak research, and built the largest consented research study in the history of critical care medicine.

He discovered important biological mechanisms underlying influenza and hepatitis. His discovery of causal evidence that TYK2 protein drives lung inflammation in life-threatening Covid-19 led directly to the finding that TYK2-inhibitor, baricitinib, saved critically-ill patients' lives - the first time a host genetic variant has led to an effective drug treatment for any infectious disease.

Kenneth Baillie's University profile

Register for the CMVM Inaugural lecture (Eventbrite)