Following the first deadline of the FNR’s COVID-19 Fast Track Call, 30 of 69 eligible projects have been retained for funding, an FNR commitment of 1.52 million euros. Among the selected projects, six have been submitted by LCSB researchers.
The FNR launched the special FNR COVID-19 funding programme to (co-)support short-term projects or the starting phase of long-term projects focusing on the current epidemic. As the expertise of the LCSB researchers in life sciences, computational biology and bioinformatics is particularly relevant to tackle this topic, they submitted nine project proposals in the first phase of the programme. Six of these will be funded with a total amount of over 285 000 euros.
Co-PhyloDyn, a project led by Dr Patrick May, member of the Bioinformatics Core of the LCSB, is dedicated to real-time monitoring and automated analysis of phylogenomic data, derived from virus genome sequencing, together with geographical and clinical data. It will help with in-depth genomic characterisation of COVID-19 positive cases in Luxembourg and provide deep insights on pathogen dynamics. The Bioinformatics Core is also in charge of a second project called COVlit and led by Prof. Reinhard Schneider, head of the group. The team will continuously enrich a knowledge base (https://biokb.lcsb.uni.lu) thanks to a text-mining pipeline analysing available COVID-19 publications. This will help researchers navigate the growing COVID-19 literature corpus.
Dr Aymeric Fouquier D’herouel from the Integrative Cell Signalling group is leading the UcoVis project: the development of an online exploration tool for genomics, proteomics, phylogeny, evolutionary and geographical data on SARS-CoV-2 samples from Luxembourg. It will help researchers visualise and study different aspects of the evolutionary dynamics of the virus, allowing them to evaluate the potential impact of viral evolution on virulence and transmission. Another computer-based project is led by Assistant Prof. Enrico Glaab, head of the Biomedical Data Science group. CovScreen will provide a fast experimental validation of drug repurposing candidates for COVID-19 from a computational pre-selection of antivirals, drugs and natural compounds.
In the framework of the stratification study (Predi-COVID) conducted by the Research Luxembourg task force, the CO-INFECTOMICS project led by Prof. Paul Wilmes aims to understand if co-infections are a predictive marker of disease severity in COVID-19 positive patients in Luxembourg. For that purpose, the researchers from the Eco-Systems Biology group will study the respiratory and intestinal microbiota of patients. Finally, the sixth project, called AICovIX+, is led by Dr Andreas Husch of the Interventional Neuroscience group and based on the researchers’ experience in deep learning for medical imaging. Their objective is to rapidly provide AI tools to speed-up diagnosis of high-risk cases from medical imaging.
To know more about these projects and exchange with the teams in charge, researchers can visit the dedicated lux-covid19.lu platform. A forum allows discussions in the framework of the COVID-19 initiative.
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FNR’s COVID-19 Fast Track Call:
The second deadline for the Call is Monday, 11 May 2020. In order to be eligible to submit to the FNR COVID-19 Call deadline on 11 May, short descriptions of project ideas must first be published on the COVID-19 platform by 29 April 2020.