Industrial Chaire
VIRESP: Global burden of respiratory viruses with interest for vaccine development
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised the attention on the substantial health, social and economic impact respiratory viruses can cause to humans worldwide. Every year, however, acute respiratory infections cause a substantial burden globally, ranking on the top three causes of death and disability among children and adults. While preparedness planning is important for potential pandemics, health loss due to seasonal viral circulation should not be ignored, and efforts to improve prevention measures are needed. Collecting information on the burden of respiratory viruses, including seasonality, strain characteristics, viral evolution, populations most vulnerable to infection, and disease severity, is key to inform decision-making regarding vaccine development, recommendations for vaccination or other prevention strategies and treatment, as part of a comprehensive disease intervention policy. To achieve this, we are proposing to develop methodologies, techniques and tools to analyse the infection risk and disease burden in different populations and the benefit of immunization programs. This Chair will support a dedicated team of researchers and train highly qualified scientists to provide evidence-based and data-driven strategic direction and enhanced research capacity around respiratory infectious diseases relevant to the pipeline of vaccine products and the optimal use of vaccinations in France and globally. This program will leverage on data, infrastructures, and expertise available from several existing partners at local, national, and global level to deliver:
1. Research publications such as scientific evidence manuscripts and policy papers, as well as conference outputs.
2. Analytical tools to better understand the burden of respiratory viruses, vaccine performance against those, and insights for the development of improved or new vaccines.
3. Approaches on how to improve current passive and active surveillance systems with the aim to enhance pandemic preparedness, and increase industrial preparedness and resilience.
4. Ways to identify better respiratory viruses’ targets for research and development (R&D) to develop improved vaccines tailored to the need of the populations at risk.
5. An algorithm to identify new viral threats to society and monitor known recurring viruses.
6. A dissemination and capacity-building program focusing on epidemiology, modelling, advanced analytics, and bioinformatics.
SHAPE-Med
In 2022, the SHAPE-Med@Lyon project (Structuring one Health Approach for Personalized Medicine in Lyon), was a winner of the Future Investment Program 4 “ExcellencES” of France 2030. SHAPE-Med@Lyon is above all a great collective success which brings together 12 partners: the Claude Bernard Lyon 1 (UCBL) and Lumière Lyon 2 universities, the Hospices Civils de Lyon (HCL), the Léon Bérard Center, the Le Vinatier Hospital Center, VetAgro Sup, CPE Lyon, with the national research organizations Inserm, CNRS, INRAE, Inria and the International Center for Research on Cancer of the World Health Organization (WHO).
The EASIER-COHORT project
The EASIER-COHORT project aims to automatically create patient cohorts for epidemiological studies. It focuses on extracting information from patient electronic medical records to identify populations in need of influenza screening, using natural language processing techniques.
The project will use the systematic influenza screening policy during the COVID-19 pandemic at Hospices Civils de Lyon (HCL) to compare the characteristics of patients testing positive for influenza before and during the pandemic. This will help identify populations at risk of influenza infections not previously tested.
This project aims to reduce the costs and time of manual annotation of medical records and to facilitate the creation of future cohorts, in particular with the establishment of the HCL health data warehouse. Applied to case detection, the project’s results could contribute to the prediction of future pandemics.
Other fundings
Applications to other fundings are ongoing.