Integrative modelling of autoimmune diseases
Host: INSTITUT PASTEUR, France
PhD awarding institution: UMPC-SORBONNE UNIVERSITÉS
Lead Supervisor: B Schwikowski
Objectives: To develop dimensionality reduction (DR) techniques that project large publicly available autoimmune-related transcriptomes and associated clinical data (i.e., from Lupus, Rheumatoid Arthritis) into a common low-dimensional space (the “AutoImmune Map (AImap)”). The structure of the low-dimensional space will be informed by high-quality, multilevel, immunoprofiling data from the Milieu Intérieur cohort of 1000 healthy donors (http://www.milieuinterieur.fr) that provides a highly resolved atlas of inter-individual variation at the level of responses to elementary and complex immune stimuli. The proposed project is the first to integrate different autoimmune-related blood transcriptomes in a semantically rich lowdimensional subspace, towards a molecular taxonomy of autoimmune diseases (cf. Barturen et al. 2018, Nat. Rev. Rheumatology). AImap will thus provide a novel, powerful basis for characterizing patient variation, discovering genetic associations, patient subclasses, and prognostic and predictive markers.