NEUROCLINOMICS - NEUROCLINOMICS - Understanding NEUROdegenerative diseases throught CLINical and OMICS data integration

From 01-03-2011 to 28-02-2014

Description

Neurodegenerative diseases present unique challenges to medicine due to their devastating effect on patients and their families, and socio-economic impact in modern societies. Declines in cognitive and motors functions, together with other evidences of neurological degeneration, become increasingly likely as healthy people age. Unfortunately, everyone will experience altered brain functions, ones at an earlier age or at a faster rate than others. As such, distinguishing the motor and cognitive declines of normal aging from those due to pathological processes, and understanding the individualized disease diagnostic and prognostic patterns, is top priority on ongoing research.

High throughput technologies have introduced a major change in both biology and medical research paradigms. From the highly restrictive tests focused on the behavior of a single gene conducted in the past, we have reached the stage where measuring andprofiling large numbers of biological entities and parameters at a time using high throughput technologies is straight forward. Analysis of these results, known as omics (genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics), presents a remarkable progress toward the understanding of the intricate functioning of the human organism as a whole.

Systems biology has been successfully studying omics, aimed at a fundamental understanding of biological processes and modeling of biological networks. However, it has focused primarily on the molecular scale disregarding the effects of physiology and its enormous variation among individuals, produced by the interaction of each person’s biology and experiences through life.  Systems medicine, has recently emerged as the application of systems biology to the prevention of, understanding and modulation of, and recovery from developmental disorders and pathologic conditions in human health, by incorporating clinical information into its models, namely environmental conditions, clinical variables, and medical imaging data. In this context, several authors already emphasized the need for integrative approaches to provide a broader understanding ofbrain related pathologies, in general, and neurogenerative diseases, in particular. These approaches should infer relationships between omics, clinical, and personal data.  However, and although promising first attempts integration wise arearising no effective integrative approaches using both omics and clinical data to deeply study neurodegenerative diseases have been proposed to date.

This project comes in this line of research, describing an innovative approach to understanding neurodegenerative diseasesthrough heterogeneous data integration. A sophisticated knowledge discovery system will integrate powerful data mining algorithms to unravel potentially relevant links between omics and clinical data. Disease diagnostic and prognostic markers, disease progression rates, and patient profiles, will be tackled. Together with the challenging task of studying complex diseases we will also embrace the challenging topic of developing efficient and effective mining algorithms for biomedical data integration.In this concern, it is our believe that our research will also make effective contributions to the advance of knowledge in heterogeneous data integration methods. In the context of this project, two neurodegenerative diseases will be used as case FCT :

Team

• Yves Moreau, Co-promoter
• Sara C. Madeira, Promoter (External)
• Léon-Charles Tranchevent, Team member
• Daniela Nitsch, Team member

Financing

Funding: OTHER - Other Funding Agencies

Program/Grant Type: Other - Other