Dr Ahmad Al Khleifat

Ahmad.al_khleifat@kcl.ac.uk

Website

Research Interests

I am the MND Association Lady Edith Wolfson and ALS Association’s Milton Safenowitz Senior Fellow. I trained in medicine in Egypt and earned my MSc and PhD in Clinical Neuroscience from King’s College London. My research group uses big data for precision medicine, optimizing clinical trials, and drug discovery. I chair the Trans-Ancestral Genetics working group in Project MinE and lead the Drug Discovery and Trials Optimisation Working Group in the DEMON network, applying AI to dementia research. I co-founded the Alan Turing Institute Interest Group in Precision Dementia Medicine and co-founded an Alzheimer’s Association group on AI for Precision Dementia Medicine. Research Focus: Complex disease genetics and precision medicine Big data application and AI in clinical trials and drug discovery Development of proteomic-based biomarkers for Neurodegeneration Structural variation analysis in genomics

Most significant discovery

I discovered that structural variation is common in ALS/MND. I showed that longer telomeres are associated with ALS. I helped identified the optimal clinical stage for Riluzole treatment, aiding patient counselling and drug development. My group was the first to characterize the sex-specific methylation profile in ALS/MND and demonstrate that methylation is associated with disease progression in ALS/MND. I helped develop several programmes including, GeneVar, DNAscan, ALSgeneScanner, SnpReportR, ExpanssionHunter and VariantSurvival for the analysis and interpretation of next generation sequence data. Our work, involving 2500 samples, pinpointed elevated plasma Neurofilament Light (NFL) levels in MND; significantly improving NFL’s reliability as a biomarker in global MND trials.

Educational Interests

• Big data approaches and AI
• Lecturing on ALS, FTD, AD in MSc degrees
• PhD and MSc project supervision
•Hackathons

Top 4 Publications

Stage at which Riluzole treatment prolongs survival in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis : a retrospective analysis of data from a doseranging study. Lancet Neurology

A multicentre validation study of the diagnostic value of plasma neurofilament light. Nature Communications

Structural variation analysis of 6,500 whole genome sequences in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Genomic Medicine.

VariantSurvival : A tool to identify genotype-treatment response. Frontiers in Bioinformatics

Methods / Expertise

• Big data and AI
• Biomarkers
• Genomics
• Methylation
• Proteomics