Our SPHN/PHRT Driver project PRECISE got approved!
Identification of biomarkers and therapeutic targets in inflammatory disease immunotherapy by high-dimensional single cell analysis and cluster proteomics
Recent advances in immunotherapy have provided a breakthrough in the treatment of patients suffering from chronic inflammatory disease. While the successes of immunotherapy are decisive, several inflammatory diseases remain untreatable. The identification of disease biomarkers of therapy responses is therefore a fundamental and urgent goal of personalized medicine.
PRECISE aims at identification of such biomarkers and proposes to acquire liquid and solid biopsies from patients suffering from chronic inflammatory disease, with a focus on those treated with immunotherapy. This material will be part of multiple independently ongoing clinical studies carried out in various Swiss clinical institutions, namely university hospitals in Zürich, Basel, Bern and Lausanne. High-dimensional single cell cytometry combined with computer-aided analysis will be used to identify cell type signatures, i.e. possibly rare, disease relevant cell subpopulations as reliable biomarkers and novel therapeutic targets. Further, identified signature cell types will be subjected to proteomic and epigenetic screening to provide an in-depth view of the biochemical state of disease-relevant cell types. Upon validation in independent patient cohorts, this information will then be used to stratify patients prior to immunotherapy to maximize the therapeutic impact and to minimize adverse effects as well as to provide new personalized therapeutic targets for immune-intervention across the Swiss wide patient population.
This project aims at interoperability of the Swiss personalized health research infrastructure network by subjecting routinely acquired patient biopsies and clinical covariates across multiple centers to a central, standardized and integrated analysis workflow. This interoperability enabling pipeline will be made available for future studies by technology translation and by data exposition in the BioMedIT infrastructure. Our vision is to open this pipeline to all clinical centers nationally, to expand it to other diseases and to implement routine procedures across Switzerland for sampling and biobanking.