Biography
Ms. Loomis leads the Emerging Portfolio team in Pfizer’s Target Sciences group. She is responsible for ensuring human-based evidence, including large-scale genetic association data and electronic health records, are leveraged for discovery and development of first in class therapeutic hypotheses. During her 13 years with Pfizer, she helped drive the integration of human genetics and population-based data into drug discovery programs across multiple therapeutic areas. She actively collaborates with industry and academic leaders around the world focused on bringing the best science to the field of human genetics for drug discovery. Current research interests include studying extreme phenotypes in humans to identify high confidence targets for diseases with unmet medical need, as well as integrating large-scale genetic, biomarker and clinical data to enable precision and personalized medicine approaches in chronic complex diseases.
Polygenic (based on multiple genes/DNA variants) predictions for disease risk and drug response are at the forefront of recent regulatory challenges in precision medicine. Challenges in deployment range from their increased complexity, their clinical actionability, and ethical challenges when a large portion of the input data come from biased subpopulations.