ASK: Clinical partners to help validate predictions

Call for clinical partners who can validate predictions in a disease model and help to provide novel strategies for COVID-19 intervention

We are a computational biology lab at CIC bioGUNE in Bilbao, Spain, and our expertise is in the development of computational and mathematical methods. We use multiple sources of biological information to study human diseases, and to design new therapeutic strategies based on disease models.

In particular, we have recently implemented a computational systems biology method that, based on transcriptomic data, infers and compares cell-cell interaction maps between disease and healthy states to identify deregulated interactions at the tissue level. Additionally, the method proposes strategies to intervene by interfering with interactions underlying specific pathological processes, such as extreme inflammatory response in infectious diseases.

The symptoms of COVID-19 vary from mild to acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is generally associated with different levels of deregulated immune cytokine production. In severe cases, immune cells are highly inflammatory and interact among themselves, and with non-immune cells, creating tissue damage.

In this regard, we propose to use our computational method to study the cell-cell interactome in lung tissues of COVID-19 patient samples, and to provide novel strategies for intervention to modulate the immune response in severe cases of the infection.

In order to achieve this goal, we are looking for collaborations with experimental/clinical partners, who generate gene expression data for lung tissues of COVID-19 patients, and who can validate our predictions in a disease model.