Kairntech empowers EU-funded COMMUTE project that explores links between Covid and neurogenerative diseases
Bonn, Dec 14-15. The EU Research project COMMUTE (“COMORBIDITY MECHANISMS UTILIZED IN HEALTHCARE”) has been kicked off. The participants met at a two day meeting at the International Center of Information Technology (B-IT) at University Bonn. Hosted and coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI), the project will investigate links between Covid-19 infections and neurodegenerative diseases.
The high numbers of Covid-19 infections in the recent past create a real risk for a surge in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson in the near future.
The key goals of the project are to understand the links between these diseases and to derive insights for diagnosis, prevention and therapy. The consortium therefore assembles partners from different backgrounds, from the life sciences, artificial intelligence as well as legal and ethical issues.
Bringing together researchers from diverse fields
Project coordinator Prof Martin Hofmann-Apitius from SCAI declares: “Preliminary evidence that a SARS-CoV-2 infection (“COVID”) induces neuroinflammation in some patients is rapidly accumulating. Already early in the pandemic Parkinsonism-like symptoms were reported as a direct effect of COVID infections. These observations prompt us to systematically investigate the link between COVID and neurodegeneration. We do that by bringing together leading experts in the field of Data Science and AI on one side. And experts in the field of translational clinical research and cellular assay systems on the other side.
COMMUTE combines a data-driven, hypothesis-free approach with a knowledge-driven strategy. Which allows us to test the most prominent comorbidity hypotheses in dedicated cellular and organoid assay systems. COMMUTE will have two major outcomes:
- an AI-based model for personalized risk assessment for COVID-induced neurodegeneration
- and a battery of cellular assay systems for drug repurposing testing
We are paving the way for both digital and pharmaceutical intervention”
Research rightfully has a high priority on the agenda of the EU and its member states. Here, COMMUTE certainly is of particularly high relevance for this agenda, since it directly investigates a potentially significantly harmful risk for a large number of patients now and in the coming years.
Knowledge graphs and natural language processing
Kairntech will contribute in deriving insights from the automatic machine learning powered analysis of large volumes of scientific content.
The European Union funded this project as part of the Horizon program. More on COMMUTE (soon) at www.commute-project.eu