21 projects
Status
Organization Type
A PRECLINICAL EVALUATION: VACCINATION AND EFFICACY AGAINST SARS-CoV-2
SARS-CoV-2, the causative factor of COVID-19, is endangering the world's health, prosperity and political crises are on the horizon. Nations worldwide had to take drastic measures to prevent catastrophes: strict confinement and hygienic measures have been undertaken to minimize the virus spread. Despite the control measures, the pandemic is inevitably damaging the economy due to a shutdown of public and business life, an overload of the healthcare systems, and the high case fatality rate of COVID-19. The global fight against COVID-19 has mobilized, and many provisional treatments are being ...
A dynamic model of the COVID-19 tuned for different countries: a systems-biological tool for the ...
A dynamic model of COVID-19 epidemics recently developed (video: https://youtu.be/lbsqJ1_WvmE, model: https://jjj.bio.vu.nl/models/westerhoff1/simulate/, ref: https://medrxiv.org/cgi/content/short/2020.03.29.20045039v1) will be tuned for different countries to analyze the effect of different measures in the anticipation of next epidemics. Models will be available for online simulations at JWS Online (https://jjj.bio.vu.nl/models/westerhoff1/simulate/), and used for the development of computer tutorials for systems biological studies.
COVID-19 and Neurturin
SARS-Cov-2 is a coronavirus is at the origin of the current COVID-19 pandemic, which poses a global and significant threat to public health worldwide. Although several treatment modalities have been evaluated, none has allowed a therapeutic breakthrough until now. New treatment modalities are therefore urgently needed. We have previously described that neurturin, a member of the glial cell line-derived neurotrophic factor family, expressed not only as a growth factor in the nervous system but also the immune system, displays clear anti-inflammatory properties in mouse asthma models. Indeed,...
COVID19 Literature Bio-Curation, Text-mining and Semantic Web Technologies
The world wide scientific response to COVID-19 pandemic is reflected in the ever-growing scientific literature. Enriching our current knowledge base (https://biokb.lcsb.uni.lu) with these publications requires joint efforts at each stage of the chain of process involved in the text-mining pipeline. This pipeline comprises several challenging tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, entity recognition and normalisation, or event extraction, which are essential to discover relevant knowledge in the form of entities, relations and events. Such knowledge is then made available to the public via se...
DICO-Lux: DIgital Covid-19 Observatory In LUXembourg: An Open Tool For SARS-COV-2 Crisis Manageme...
Monitoring online activities for public health purposes has been investigated since the first days of the digital epidemiology field early 2010s, with the objective of capturing health-related trends and model disease outbreaks. Most famous examples of internet surveillance were developed for the flu, influenza AH1N1, the Zika virus or Ebola. We now have the opportunity to leverage both the digital data available online and the appropriate Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text Mining methods to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. The main objective of the DICO-LUX project is to rapidly d...
Distributional impact of the COVID-19 Crisis
The project aims to assess the costs and distributional implications of the COVID-19 outbreak in Luxembourg. It will identify those most likely to suffer from income losses, leading to more effective/efficient targeting of income support measures and improved cost estimates of COVID-19. The lack of timely available data constrains the estimation of the scale and direction of recent changes in the income distribution, which in turn constrain policymakers seeking to monitor such developments. There are huge uncertainties about the budgetary costs and distributional impacts of the outbreak....
Efficacity of probiotics on coronavirus in order to overcome upcoming outbreaks
The objective of this project is to develop efficient and resistant probiotic based cleaners to reduce and limit the proliferation of the coronavirus (SARS-Cov-2) responsible of the covid-19 pandemic. Hard surfaces cleaner (dedicated to hospitals and house care cleaning), as well as hands cleaner will be developed based on the synergy between probiotics formulation as well as active natural and environmentally friendly molecules designed for cleaning. Probiotics were shown to have beneficial effect on several viral diseases, while microbial based cleaning products have shown to red...
Functional characterization of COVID-19 patient gut microbiome
While COVID-19 is mainly considered an airway and lung disease, up to 79% of patients present with gastrointestinal symptoms and recent studies report on the presence of SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA and particles in stools of infected patients, suggesting that the gastrointestinal (GI) tract may have a more important role in disease pathology or transmission than previously thought. The GI tract is also the site of the dense and diverse microbiome, which has the ability to regulate intestinal and systemic immunity through the conversion of dietary nutrients into bioactive metabolites. Consequently,...