Jaroslav Bendl

@doctorveera Congrats Veera! You are the best guy for that role! India is lucky to have you back.

After a decade abroad in research, I am happy to be home 🇮🇳. I am excited to share that I am joining the AI healthcare startup Wellytics as Chief Scientific Officer. I trained as a physician in India. I moved abroad to pursue human genetics and later focused on genetics-driven target discovery and drug development at Regeneron. Returning now to build in India feels deeply meaningful. At Wellytics, I will lead R&D and build our genomics division. - We will establish large-scale Indian genomic datasets to power drug discovery. - We will build a world-class human genetics and target discovery team. - We will collaborate closely with academic geneticists across India. - We will provide tools, training, and support to strengthen human genomics research in India. Wellytics is digitizing Indian healthcare and making it AI ready. We will combine AI, clinical data, and genomics to generate real-world evidence and build international-grade genetic association resources for India. Excited to help build a genetics-driven drug discovery engine in India!

Now out in @Nature: Biological insights into schizophrenia from ancestrally diverse populations. With @MountSinaiPsych @SinaiBrain @SinaiGenetics @CDNeurogenomics @POPGEM_Lab #MillionVeteranProgram and collaborators across consortia. Read: rdcu.be/eZ7he

Excited to share our new Nature Neuroscience paper! @JaroslavBendl @FullardJohn @panos_roussos nature.com/articles/s4159… We mapped chromatin accessibility in 1,393 brain and found that the epigenomic fingerprints of schizophrenia in adult neurons mirror fetal development.

So incredibly excited to be able to officially highlight the outstanding work of @SashaLFulton, a previous superstar PhD student in my lab and now a superstar postdoc in the @IshmailSaboor lab at Columbia (also an @HHMINEWS Hanna H. Gray Fellow), now out at @NeuroCellPress !!

Congrats @TerezaClarence for the “Multiomic single-cell profiling identifies critical regulators of postnatal brain” now published in @NatureGenet @MountSinaiPsych @SinaiBrain @SinaiGenetics @CDNeurogenomics nature.com/articles/s4158…

Excited to share a new study mapping postnatal human brain development with multi-omic single-nucleus data rdcu.be/eabgy 🧠 101,924 nuclei | 4 regions | 10 donors | 5 key stages 🧬 Cell-type GRN linking GWAS loci to 1,149 genes ⚡ Oligodendrogenesis & brain disorders

Excited to share our latest review in @TrendsGenetics cell.com/trends/genetic…

Did you know it takes an average of 8 years to diagnose #BipolarDisorder? Newly published research from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (bit.ly/3JkuokY) aims to improve this by learning more about the condition’s biology. Now in Nature: go.nature.com/3PJhi3W

🧠 New brain atlas reveals region-specific gene regulation & promoter-isoform insights, advancing neuropsychiatric disorder research & genetic fine-mapping. #Genomics #Neuroscience #cdneurogenomics #roussoslab Read more in #NatureCommunications rdcu.be/d06ta

🎉 Excited to announce preprints from the first #PsychAD package! Check out details of our work at Psych-AD.org 🧵 Found out summary of papers below👇

Thrilled to share our latest research in @NatureComms on idiopathic Parkinson’s disease! 🧠 Grateful for the amazing collaborative effort!🙌 @Dr_HeFeng Check it out! doi.org/10.1038/s41467…

We are thrilled to share a preprint on human myeloid cells and AD. Collaboration with @panos_roussos @FullardJohn @ChrisAPorras @collin_spencer_ @MilosPjanic @PhilippWeiler7 and many others.

As part of an int'l team of researchers creating a detailed atlas of human brain cells, @IcahnMountSinai's Dr. @panos_roussos, et al. have constructed the First “Multiome” Atlas of Cell Development in Human Cerebral Cortex From Before Birth to Adulthood.👉 tinyurl.com/y6wesubv

"Excited to share our latest preprint from @LabRoussos on to-date largest cell-specific ATAC-seq dataset generated from the PFC and ACC regions” medrxiv.org/content/10.110… @JaroslavBendl

Excited to share the first GWAS of binge eating disorder using #MVP from @BursteinPhD TrevorGriffen @voloudakis at #CenterDiseaseNeurogenomics @MountSinaiPsych @SinaiGenetics @SinaiBrain @IcahnMountSinai that was published in @NatureGenet nature.com/articles/s4158…

Thrilled to share our human genetics discovery of the protective association between rare variants in CHRNB2 (encoding a subunit of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors) and smoking addiction, now out in @NatureGenet. See the reply for a detailed thread. Below is a short summary. The publication of the haplotype map of the human genome by the international HapMap consortium led to advancements in genotyping technologies opening the era of genome-wide association studies in 2005. In the years that followed, GWAS researchers happily harvested the genetic associations that we call today “low-hanging fruits”. Welcome to the era of “medium-hanging fruits”. Unlike common variant associations (the ones with large effects), discovering rare variant associations requires many folds bigger sample size. Thanks to the UK Biobank, Regeneron Genetics Center, and dozens of other industry partners. Today we can make rare variant discoveries using exome sequences of hundreds of thousands of humans. The rare variant discoveries are not easily achievable as low-hanging fruits but also not as challenging or distant as high-hanging fruits. A little push to the big sample size offered by the UK biobank helps us reach those medium-hanging fruits. What we report today in Nature Genetics is one such discovery. By scanning through exome sequences of ~750,000 humans, we have captured those extra-ordinarily rare human beings gifted with mutations in gene CHRNB2 (encoding a subunit of the major nicotinic receptor in the brain) that protect them from getting addicted to smoking. What’s incredible about this discovery is that neuroscientists working on animal models had the intuition decades ago that these receptors are important for nicotine to act and performed animal experiments and validated their hypothesis. But to witness the same in humans, the scientific community had to wait almost 30 years for the technologies to advance. I am thankful that luck has put me in the right place at the right time to be make this discovery. My sincere gratitude to my supervisor Giovanni Coppola who gave the opportunity to lead this project and to all the co-authors without whom this achievement would not be possible. There are so many exciting findings in the paper. Please read and enjoy the science. nature.com/articles/s4158…

Our spatio-synteny paper finally out in iScience! Excellent collab with Simakov team in Vienna doi.org/10.1016/j.isci…

Our new software dreamlet scales differential expression analysis for single cell data: doi.org/10.1101/2023.0… Checkout the R package: diseaseneurogenomics.github.io/dreamlet

🔥 HOT OFF THE PRESS @NatureGenet 📰 Genome-wide analyses of ADHD identify 27 risk loci, refine the genetic architecture and implicate several cognitive domains 👩🏾‍🤝‍👨🏿 @AndersBorglum @DemontisDitte and team ⬇️ go.nature.com/3WGYLWI