RTG 2338 Targets in Toxicology
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Project P06

COMBAT C19IR: Clinical- and Omic-Based Analysis of Trajectory for COVID-19 Infection and Recovery

In our collaborative Covid-19 project, the course, prognosis, co-infections and complications as well as individual susceptibilities, especially in lung patients, of SARS Cov2 patients are analyzed using multi-omics analysis and artificial intelligence. The project is made possible by a Helmholtz-wide cooperation between the AG Hilgendorff/CPC-M bioArchive, the Institute of Computational Biology (ICB) with the research groups Ahmidi and Schubert, the AG Deng from the Institute of Virology, Dr. Stefanie Hauck and her team of the Core Facility Proteomics as well as our partners at the University of Munich Hospital.

 

Our goal is to develop and validate Artificial Intelligence (AI) models that can reliably predict the course of COVID-19 infection and its short and long-term complications by

  1. modeling the clinical course of COVID-19 patients to understand disease progression and recovery with special emphasis on the development of pulmonary complications,
  2. characterizing the diversity and virulence of the co-infecting viral and microbial communities to understand disease mechanisms and severity, and
  3. biological characterization of the host to understand individual susceptibility to infection, with special emphasis on patients with pre-existing lung diseases.

We validate and update our AI-based models using clinical data sets and biosamples from five different international patient cohorts: three cohorts from Munich and two from the US. In addition, we confirm the patient's discharge findings after a period of three months, in particular to investigate the medium-term effects of this infection on lung health. In addition, we compare the course of recovery of COVID-19 patients with that of patients recovering from diseases with similar symptoms such as influenza and community-acquired pneumonia.

 

This project is in direct synergy, both in content and methodology, with the GRK PhD thesis of our PhD student Erika Rodriguez Gonzalez: "Acute and long term effects of Long Term Oxygen Treatment (LTOT) at the epigenetic, genetic and proteomic levels".