LUMC researchers participate in four new Horizon Europe projects
The kickoff event of the INSAFEDARE project (1 of the 4 Horizon Europe research projects) took place in Brussels in December 2023.
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Artificial datasets for clinical decision-making
The INSAFEDARE project, in which LUMC is a participant, focuses on developing a toolkit to support regulatory decision-making in healthcare. The toolkit provides methods to accelerate and improve the development and approval process of medical applications, such as clinical decision support systems (CDSS) and risk prediction models. These methods are based on smart use of synthetic (artificial) data in this process, before real privacy-sensitive data can be used.
INSAFEDARE is testing the toolkit on the certification of a CDSS for detecting tumors in children using synthetic data, and a synthetic version of the population within the Extramural LUMC Academic Network (ELAN).
The LUMC team consisting of Prof. Dr. Marco Spruit, Dr. Marcel Haas and Jim Achterberg will generate synthetic SPD datasets and develop matching evaluation metrics from the Health Campus in The Hague, among other things. LUMC will receive €570,000 of the €4.8 million budgeted for the overall project.
Identifying harmful cells by using light therapy
The RETINA project is an exciting collaboration between researchers in healthcare, automotive and agriculture. Together they are working on two new systems based on light technology. In these, they are trying to achieve the following:
- Recognizing harmful cells and monitoring blood flow during surgeries.
- Smart detection systems in cars that can help prevent accidents.
- Advanced technology for agriculture to, for example, measure the amount of water in the soil or predict plant contamination.
LUMC, under the coordination of Joost van der Vorst and Alexander Vahrmeijer, will take on the entire clinical side of the project. For this, the hospital will receive more than 600,000 euros of the 6.6 million euros budgeted for the total project.
Better prediction of heart attacks
TargetMI is a research project in which researchers from the LUMC (Frits Rosendaal, Bart van Vlijmen and Astrid van Hylckama Vlieg) and the University of Malta are working together. With a budget of 4 million euros, they will look for new drug candidates and ways to better predict heart attacks.
The team will study all kinds of data of a thousand people, such as genetic information, substances in the body and proteins. In doing so, the researchers will use advanced techniques, such as machine learning.
The project hopes to discover patterns that can help identify people at high risk for heart attack. The study could lead to better treatments and preventive actions to prevent heart attacks. The goal is to quickly convert the results to the patient.
Potential triggers for autoimmune diseases
Within the European consortium DarkMatter, LUMC's Department of Rheumatology is focusing on the relationship between microbial exposure and the development of various nontransmitted diseases. Led by Dr. Diane van der Woude of LUMC, the consortium is looking at the autoimmune diseases rheumatoid arthritis, SLE and scleroderma, among others.
State-of-the-art techniques are being used to identify both infectious triggers and genetic risk factors. For example, 600,000 bacterial and viral antigens are being investigated. Genetic research is also being done on various polymorphisms (small changes in DNA).
Comparing data from healthy people and that of patients with autoimmune diseases will reveal both disease-transcending and disease-specific factors.