On November 27, 2020, the Imagine hospital-university institute signed a funding agreement with the ANR (French National Research Agency) to support the ATRACTion research project, an ambitious program that, since 2019, has brought together eleven academic and industrial partners. The objective is to better understand primary immunodeficiency syndromes in order to better treat the associated autoimmune diseases, using multi-omic analysis approaches, in particular single-cell, coupled with analyses based on artificial intelligence.
The Pharmacology and Immunoanalysis Unit (SPI/Joliot) will contribute to the project by performing metabolomic analyses on fecal, blood and urine samples from patients with primary immune deficiencies. The SPI metabolomics platform, housed within the Laboratoire d'Études du Métabolisme des Médicaments (LEMM), has recognized expertise in mass spectrometric analyses of human biological samples (blood, urine, feces) on a large scale, allowing the simultaneous monitoring of approximately 300 metabolites in each of these matrices. As part of ATRACTion, LEMM will establish metabolic profiles of fecal samples compared to those obtained from blood and urine samples from the same patients, with a particular focus on the intestinal microbiome. The role of the latter in the pathogenesis and evolution of several pathologies is no longer in doubt (e.g. monitoring the evolution of liver cirrhosis within the framework of the european consortium MICROB-PREDICT). The obtained results will be integrated with other types of omics, biochemical and clinical data using bioinformatics tools. They will thus contribute to a better understanding of the primary immune deficiency syndrome in order to stratify patients suffering from autoimmune and inflammatory diseases and to propose them more appropriate treatments. This project will enable the SPI to strengthen its visibility in the field of personalized medicine, as well as its collaborations with key players in the field of intestinal microbiome analysis (notably with MetaGenoPolis, the INRAE center of excellence in microbiome analysis, located in Jouy-en-Josas).
Schematic representation of the human intestinal microbiome © CanStockPhoto.com
"The strength and originality of this project relies on single-cell analysis of human biological samples that will lead to the emergence of new and uncharacterized biological interaction networks, and on the analysis in parallel of the microbiota composition and microbial metabolites in order to understand the role of intestinal bacteria in these pathologies", announces Dr Frédéric Rieux-Laucat, program coordinator. ATRACTion thus opens the way to a much more personalized medicine and to new diagnostic but also therapeutic solutions, based on new molecules, or on the repositioning of treatments already used for other pathologies.
Joliot researchers contacts : Florence Castelli, François Fenaille
To find out more, read the release issued to the press on January 14th.