Genetic information is likely to become increasingly significant in many areas of medicine.This provides an unparalleled opportunity to advance the understanding of the role of genetic factors in human health and disease, to allow more precise definition of the nongenetic factors involved, and to apply this insight rapidly to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. Large numbers of complex genetic sequences are increasingly becoming available, providing a unique opportunity for studying the many diseases where genetic information will become important in future years, such as in the case of infectious diseases.
As a prototype the problem of HIV drug resistance is addressed. ViroLab integrates biomedical information from viruses (e.g., proteins and mutations), patients (e.g., viral load) and literature (e.g., drug resistance experiments), resulting in a rule-based distributed decision support system for drug ranking, as well as advanced tools for (bio)statistical analysis, visualization, modelling and simulation.
The main objectives of ViroLab are to:
- develop a virtual organisation that binds the various components of the ViroLab;
- develop a virtual laboratory infrastructure for transparent workflow, data access, experimental execution and collaboration support;
- virtualize and enhance the state of the art in genotypic resistance interpretation tools, integrating them into the virtual laboratory;
establish epidemiological validation showing that ViroLab correctly and quantitatively predicts virological and immunological outcome, and disseminate the results to stakeholders.
For further information, please visit:
http://www.virolab.org
Project co-ordinator:
University of Amsterdam, Informatics Institute, Section Computational Science
Partners:
- University of Amsterdam (NL)
- University Medical Centre Utrecht (NL)
- High Performance Computing Center (DE)
- Institute of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Catholic University (IT)
- Institute de recerca de la SIDA IRSICAIXA Foundation (ES)
- Institute of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, University of Brescia (IT)
- Laboratory for Clinical and Epidemiological Virology, REGA institute, Catholic University Leuven (BE)
- Dept. of Plant Taxonomy and Ecology, Eötvös Loránd University (HU)
- GridwiseTech (PL)
- AGH University of Science and Technology (PL)
- University College London (UK)
- Virology Education B.V. (NL)
Timetable: from 03/06 to 03/09
Total cost: 3.499.240
EC funding: 3.334.840
Instrument: STREP
Project Identifier: IST-2004-027446