Professor Sammy Bedoui of the Doherty Institute has developed a genomics-focused platform for treatment of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases.
Lead: Professor Sammy Bedoui, Doherty Institute and University of Melbourne Department of Microbiology and Immunology
Key partners: Melbourne School of Engineering, the Water & Eliza Hall Institute
Researchers at the Doherty Institute, in collaboration with computational biologists at the Melbourne School of Engineering and the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute received a $2 million grant to better understand disease progression in patients with COVID-19.
They conducted deep biological and immunological profiling of patients, applying computational approaches to develop decision-making tools capable of predicting disease outcomes in individuals and tailoring treatment options to their unique genetic make-up.
After early success researching COVID-19, the project was able to attract additional funding, expanding to support treatment of tuberculosis, cancer immunotherapy, and other chronic diseases.
Public health genomics provided insight on community transmission and spread, but understanding of why people respond to the virus so differently is still largely unknown. The ID Predict platform examined aspects such as immune cell composition and function, virus parameters, microbiome diversity and metabolic activities, as well as co-morbidities to create deep biological and immunological profiling of patients. Innovative computational approaches were then be applied to these data sets to develop decision-making tools capable of predicting disease outcomes in individual patients and tailoring treatment options.