Lab activities

Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is the most common, chronic, inflammatory joint disease with a prevalence of about 1% of the adult population (22M patients worldwide and 7M in EU) and estimated to be responsible for 10,000 disability adjusted life years (DALY’s) costing EU society €55B annually. Despite aggressive therapy, about a third of patients have to give up work within 5 years of disease onset mainly due to lack of response to multiple disease modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs), multi-drug resistance (MDR). Thus, the main objective of this proposal is to define the clinical and molecular phenotypes leading to MDR in RA patients to prevent when possible or, when not possible, optimise the management of these patients.Read more.

The HEAL ITALIA Project aims to strengthen the research and innovation chain in the field of Precision Medicine, also through active participation in the development of value chains considered strategic for the country. Personalized and Precision Medicine represent a shift from a one-size-fits-all approach to an optimized strategy for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases for each person, based on their unique characteristics. Consequently, this approach places the patient at the center of the healthcare system, aiming for optimal management of the disease and/or predisposition to the disease. The benefits of Precision Medicine are proven by recent developments in areas such as: diagnostic tests, Omic technologies, analysis of molecular mechanisms, real-time monitoring of disease-associated parameters and compliance with prescribed medicines.Read more.

The project "A multiscale integrated approach to the study of the nervous system in health and disease" (MNESYS), aims to develop new approaches for experimental and clinical neuroscience in a perspective of precision, personalised and predictive medicine with a transformative impact on the treatment of diseases of the nervous system and behaviour. The underlying paradigm of the MNESYS project involves the integration of medical, biological, technological and computational expertise with the ultimate goal of gaining a comprehensive understanding of some of the key aspects of the functioning of the nervous system under physiological conditions and in the context of its most epidemiologically relevant diseases. .Read more.

There is an urgent need to understand the interplay of pollutants with adverse effects in the brain, in order to steer political decision making for efficient reduction of air pollutants. This could, in the long run, reduce the economic burden caused by diseases associated with them. To address this unmet need, the TUBE-project unites interdisciplinary expertise to study these adverse effects of extremely fine particles (UFP’s) in the human lung and brain. Leaning on this interdisciplinary approach and state of the art research methodologies, TUBE will aim to discover the harmful components of air pollution and identify biomarkers for early detection of brain disease related to air pollution. This could improve brain health, reduce the prevalence of brain diseases, provide significant economical savings, and provide data that will be used to support planning future traffic policy across the EU. Read more.

ADAIR applies a precision medicine approach to stratify individuals to subgroups for risk estimation and future AD prevention, ultimately aiming to target air pollution induced effects in those individualsthat can most benefit from them. The project investigates the novel, ambitious hypothesis that the pollutant exposure environment of an individual alters cellular mechanisms and functions, resulting in the expression of measurable biomarkers. By identifying biomarkers, the individuals with increased AD risk can be stratified prior to the disease onset and preventive measures can be targeted to the specific at-risk populations in order to be most effective.
The main objectives are to:

• Discover biomarkers of air pollutant effects.
• Correlate biomarkers to AD risk to identify sub-groups of individuals with an increased susceptibility for air pollutant effects.
• Better understand how the exposure environment is linked with complex disease mechanisms underlying AD, thus paving the way for future therapeutic approaches.

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The University of Eastern Finland has received EU funding to recruit 14 doctoral students into a four-year multidisciplinary Neuro-Innovation PhD programme, which will be implemented on the Kuopio campus. The University of Verona and Infomics research group are partners of the neuro-innovation PhD programme. The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Cofund grant of 1,5 million euros will increase the scope and quality of multidisciplinary research in the UEF Neuroscience Research Community (NEURO). Thereby, it will also generate a strong positive impact on health innovation in Finland and beyond. The recruitment of the international PhD students will start in June 2021. Read more.

We are organizing the special session Modeling and simulation methods for computational biology and system medicine as part of the 20th Computational Intelligent Methods for Bioinformatics and Biostatistics conference:

Computational biology is a field that involves the analysis of biological systems at various levels of complexity, using appropriate modeling frameworks and computational methods. With the advancement of computational biology approaches and modeling systems, the current challenge is to employ these techniques to define personalized models that identify tailored drugs and therapies, thus realizing the personalized medicine paradigm. The aim of this special session is to bring together researchers who are working on the development of methods and models applied in the fields of computational biology and systems medicine to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and ideas in these innovative and fundamental research areas
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Rosalba Giugno is board member of the J.T. Schwartz International School for Scientific Research.

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Speakers, chairs and organizers

Members of Infomics group are active as speakers, chairs and organizers in conferences such as ACM ICDM, ACM CIKM, RECOMB, IEEE ISBI, IEEE BIBM, IEEE ICHI, ACM-BCB, IEEE CIBCB, CNB-MAC, KDIR, EVOBIO, GECCO, CIBB, BITS, Oxford Global, ISMB and ECCB.

Organizers of MODIMO 2023

InfOmics group is organizing the workshop on Multi-Omics Data Integration for Modelling Biological Systems at CIKM conference in Birmingham, UK. Link

Rosalba Giugno is editor in Frontiers in Genetics and she has received the Frontiers in Genetics 2021 Outstanding Associate Editor Award–Specialty Section Computational Genomics. Frontiers in Genetics publishes rigorously peer-reviewed research on genes and genomes relating to all the domains of life, from humans to plants to livestock and other model organisms. Led by an outstanding Editorial Board of the world’s leading experts, this multidisciplinary, open-access journal is at the forefront of communicating cutting-edge research to researchers, academics, clinicians, policy makers and the public. The study of inheritance and the impact of the genome on various biological processes is well documented. However, the majority of discoveries are still to come. A new era is seeing major developments in the function and variability of the genome, the use of genetic and genomic tools and the analysis of the genetic basis of various biological phenomena. Read more.

Rosalba Giugno is associate editor in Frontiers in Bioinformatics | Network in Bioinformatics. Modern molecular and cell biology no longer focus on single macromolecules but now look into complexes, pathways or even entire organism interactomes. The emerging field of network biology is now mainly centred on unravelling these relationships and developing novel methodologies to extract the information that they contain. A deeper knowledge of the global topology of interactome networks, and how they change in response to insults (i.e. disease states) will have important bearings in many scientific areas, from evolutionary biology to biomedical research. Read more.

Rosalba Giugno is Bioinformatics editor in Elsevier Information Systems Journal. Information systems are the software and hardware systems that support data-intensive applications. The journal Information Systems publishes articles concerning the design and implementation of languages, data models, process models, algorithms, software and hardware for information systems. Subject areas include data management issues as presented in the principal international database conferences (e.g., ACM SIGMOD/PODS, VLDB, ICDE and ICDT/EDBT) as well as data-related issues from the fields of data mining/machine learning, information retrieval coordinated with structured data, internet and cloud data management, business process management, web semantics, visual and audio information systems, scientific computing, and data science. Read more.

Rosalba Giugno is coordinator of the ELIXIR node of Verona.

Rosalba Giugno is board member of the Bioinformatics Italian Society (BITS).

Rosalba Giugno was director of CINI Infolife from 2016 to 2022.