Prof Mina Ryten

Biography

Prof Mina Ryten is a clinician scientist with a long-standing interest in the use of human brain transcriptomics to understand neurological diseases. Mina began her medical training in Cambridge University and went on to complete an MBPhD 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 Institute of Child Health. In January 2024 Mina’s lab moved to Cambridge University, where she also became the Director of the UK DRI at Cambridge. At the core of her group’s research is the use of human brain transcriptomic data as a genome-wide functional read-out of an individual’s DNA – a read-out which can inform our understanding of the genetic origins of neurodegenerative diseases. For rare neurogenetic diseases this has meant using correlations in transcriptomic data to identify hidden gene-gene relationships amongst Mendelian genes. In the context of complex neurological diseases, Mina has generated and used 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 the generation and use of human brain transcriptomic data with a specific focus on neurodegenerative diseases and particularly Lewy body disorders.