Big Data & Bioengineering

• 21 European institutions join forces to tackle end-stage liver disease and liver failure with a systems medicine approach
• Navarrabiomed-FMS takes part in the project through the Traslational Bioinformatics Unit.
   

Despite a vast array of available interventions and medications, more than 1 million people die of chronic liver disease (cirrhosis) per year worldwide, when the disease progresses to decompensated cirrhosis and acute-on-chronic liver failure (ACLF), a state in which the dysfunctional liver induces failure of other organs.

Following an acute decompensation of cirrhosis, 14% of the patients die of ACLF within 3 months. The reason why certain patients die and others survive is unknown, but huge differences between patients with regard to their individual genetics, medical history, precipitating events, clinical presentation and treatment response are suspected.

These individual differences call for personalised treatments based on a precise understanding of underlying mechanisms. Systems medicine and high-throughput technology nowadays allow for highly efficient analysis, integration, and predictive modelling of clinical data to develop the best fitted, most personalised treatment for each patient.

Over the next 5.5 years, the DECISION research consortium will analyse and integrate data from already existing clinical data and biological samples from 2,200 patients with cirrhosis at more than 8,600 time points to identify novel combinatorial therapies, validate them in animal models, and then test the most promising combinatorial therapy in a clinical trial.

The overall aim of the DECISION project is to prevent ACLF and to significantly reduce the mortality rate amongst patients with decompensated cirrhosis. The project receives 6 million € funding from the European Commission.
 

• Website: decision-for-liver.eu/
• David Gómez Cabrero. Head of the Traslational Bioinformatics Unit. 

The research has been conducted by PhD student Victoria Carr and co-led by Dr David Moyes, King´s College London and Dr David Gómez Cabrero, Navarrabiomed

The results have been published by Nature Communications journal

Dr David Gómez Cabrero, head of the Translational Bioinformatics Unit of Navarrabiomed, recently published with professionals at King's College London the results of an investigation that focuses on the characterization of antibiotic resistance within the oral cavity. The results of the study, carried out in 2017-2020, have recently been published in the journal Nature Communications and represent a significant advance in our understanding of antibiotic resistance and its relationship with the oral microbiome.
 
The generation of antibiotic resistance by certain microorganisms - including bacteria - is a global healthcare threat. To understand the process of antibiotic resistance acquisition, databases of the genes that drive this resistance have been generated (the profile of these genes is known as the “resistome”). Despite the high prevalence of microorganisms in the human oral cavity, until now, the study of the resistome in the mouth has been limited.
 
The research carried out at King's College London, and Navarrabiomed has thoroughly analyzed the oral resistome in 788 worldwide samples; furthermore, the oral resistome was also compared with the intestine resistome (derived from stool sample analysis). The combination of microbial DNA sequencing techniques and their bioinformatic analysis have allowed the identification of differences associated with the country of origin and their location within the oral cavity.
 
Specifically, differences in the prevalence of genes, classes and mechanisms of antibiotic resistance have been observed. For example, it has been shown that although there is a smaller range of different antibiotic resistance genes in the oral cavity, the prevalence of specific antibiotic resistance genes is higher than in the gut. Likewise, similarities in the resistome between saliva samples and faeces from the same individuals have been identified and shown to be less than similarities between the oral cavity of two separate individuals.
 
The study highlights the importance of characterizing the resistome in various regions of the human body to discover the potential for antibiotic resistance in each area and to what extent it affects the use of antibiotics in the clinical context.

• Abundance and diversity of resistomes differ between healthy human oral cavities and gut. Nature Communications. 
• Behind the paper: The oral resistome: A refreshing perspective on AMR. David Moyes.