BME is participating in the EU's global research initiative entitled “EU Joint Programme – Neurodegenerative Disease Research” (JPND) aimed at tackling the challenge of neurodegenerative diseases.

Research into Alzheimer's disease is a key area for understanding cognitive decline and dementia in old age, and neurodegenerative diseases in general, which are placing an increasing burden on societies. The neurobiological focus of the research is on microglial cells, which make up the immune system of the brain and play a prominent role in neuroinflammation, the inflammatory processes of the central nervous system. This project investigates the molecular biological mechanisms and systems of this process and ways to influence it, using biomarkers which can be measured in the blood and the gene expression profiles of microglia cells.

The only Hungarian member of the project is the Bioinformatics laboratory and the Artificial Intelligence Research Group of the Department of Measurement and Information Systems (MIT) of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, led by Péter Antal.

Within the international consortium, BME is responsible for integrating the existing data analysis backgrounds of the participating institutions in order to provide biostatistical and bioinformatics support for the project. This BME research aims to create artificial intelligence models that can integrate multiple human biobanks, spanning multiple domains, modalities and national code systems. Animal experiments will be used for the targeted causal testing of molecular mechanisms, and the results will also be used to fine-tune artificial intelligence models. The SOLID project is in line with the exploratory life science research conducted by MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Research Group in the areas of healthspan, mental health, ageing and pharmaceutical research.
 

Image by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

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