The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a small country which is rightfully considered the heart of Europe.
The University of Luxembourg, founded in 2003, is the only state university of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It consists of three faculties: the Faculty of Science, Technology and Communication, the Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, the Faculty of Language and Literature, Humanities, Arts and Education. One of the subdivisions of the University is the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB), the main objective of which is to introduce technologies into studying various biological processes of the body in order to optimize medical approaches.
Due to the initiative of OSMU International Affairs Department, in March 2017 the staff of the LCSB participated in the Siberian School of Clinical Neurology (Omsk) with reports on the structure and functions of the LCSB, scientific research on Parkinson’s disease, clinical and translational control, as well as data analysis.
In May 2017 there was a return business visit of Omsk delegation consisting of OSMU Interim Rector V.A. Okhlopkov, Head of International Affairs Department S.A. Pisklakova, Head of Neurology for Advanced Professional Training Department A.S. Rozhdestvensky, and foundations for international scientific cooperation were laid. Yet details on cooperation, technical and medical issues and successive steps to achieve common objectives were to be discussed. In February 2018 a working visit of Omsk neurologists of the Neurology for Advanced Professional Training Department and an IT specialist was held to the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine within the framework of implementing the joint project on genetic epidemiology of Parkinson’s disease.
The first meeting was informal with the participation of Director of the LCSB Rudi Balling and research fellow Venkata Satagopam. During the meeting, head of Omsk delegation Aleksey Rozhdestvensky made an unusual present for Europeans from a Siberian remote village…
In the photo: Rudi Balling (L) and Aleksey Rozhdestvensky (R)
The issues of implementing technologies into studying various aspects of Parkinson’s disease were discussed. Despite the two hundred period of this disease study, its etiology still remains a subject of scientific interest. A special attention was paid to issues of digitization, registration and reproducibility of clinical data by programme standardization of working with patients.
Foreign specialists told about the used software within the clinical work with patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease. REDCap is a system of electronic data collection to study clinical and translational data. This application is widely used by the medical community for academic research. TranSMART is a system of knowledge management that allows researchers to develop and improve scientific hypotheses studying correlations between genetic and phenotypic data and estimate their analytical results in the context of published literature and other papers.
ADA (LCSB’ own development) is also a knowledge management system, like TranSMART, however it has appeared due to the need to eliminate some of its shortcomings. It was designed directly for the NCER-PD project inside the LCSB. It provides an infrastructure for the reliable integration of heterogeneous clinical and experimental data, for the purpose of their further analysis and visualization.
In the photo (L-R): Pavel Negoduiko– IT specialist;
Roman Delov – Associate Professor of Neurology Department at OSMU;
Venkata Satagopam – a research fellow in the Bioinformatics Core group (Schneider Lab);
Stephan Gebel – a research fellow in the Bioinformatics Core group (Schneider Lab);
This approach in the study of clinical aspects of pathology opens up fundamentally new horizons in the formation of a clinical profile, both for an individual patient and for whole cohorts of patients. The use in the work with patients of high-tech equipment with the possibility of multivariate analysis of indicators characterizing the pathological process is a direct path to future medicine or “4P Medicine”. Its name is derived from four fundamental principles: personalization, prediction, prevention and participation. 4P Medicine is not a separate branch of medicine, first of all it is an ideology, in the focus of which there is an individual approach to the patient. Its goal is the preclinical detection of diseases, and developing a set of preventive measures. In other words, if medicine in its traditional sense deals with the manifestations of the disease (both infectious and chronic), 4P Medicine is aimed at identifying risk factors, determining a patient's predisposition to certain diseases and preventing them.
Going back to the first day agenda, one cannot pass over the report on cell lines in the study of Parkinson’s disease. The study of cell lines allows modelling dopaminergic neurons from dermal fibroblasts and estimating the cell sensitivity to various disturbing factors in vitro, as well as studying the influence of neuroprotective molecules. The clinical part of the work with the inclusion in the programme of patients' examination of various electronic devices, which makes it possible to get the usual clinical data in digital equivalent, was impressive. The objectivity of monitoring the parameters of the course of Parkinson's disease and the effectiveness of the therapy is expressed not by subjective clinical sensations, but by objective digital significance does not cause the slightest doubt. For example, one of the gadgets used in the LCSB are sneakers with latching sensors that transmit information on the length and frequency of steps, time spent on reaching the control point, the distance from the floor to the edge of the patient's foot, and much more on the screen of the doctor's tablet.
In the photo (L-R): Lukas Pavelka – a neurologist in the Clinical & Experimental Neuroscience group (Krüger Lab);
Katarzyna Golkowska– a research fellow in the LCSB;
Roman Delov – Associate Professor of Neurology Department at OSMU;
Pavel Negoduiko– IT specialist;
In addition, in the course of working with patients, a large number of different scales and questionnaires are used, reflecting the variety of the clinical picture in this neurodegenerative disease (Sniffin’ Sticks Test, MoCa test, PDQ-39, Beck Depression Scale, Starkstein Apathy Scale, Parkinson Disease Sleep Scale, etc.). The design of the joint international project includes the collection and analysis of all biological samples of patients with PD (blood, urine, saliva, feces, skin, hair, swabs and swishes from the nose, cerebrospinal fluid, biopsy of the intestinal mucosa).
Integrated Biobank of Luxembourg is a truly tremendous modern achievement uniting the functions of a research laboratory and storage of biological samples, both in nominal and digital equivalents. The Biobank was founded in 2008 within the framework of the state programme for the development of Public Health and Information Technologies and represents a bridge between science and medicine, working closely with hospitals and clinicians on the one hand, and researchers on the other. The functions of the Biobank are the collection, processing, testing and storage of biological samples, including blood, urine, tissue, saliva and stool of patients and healthy people, with their consent. Besides, the Biobank collects medical data relating to the samples, such as age, gender or diagnosis, depersonalizing personal information about the subject of the study. Samples and data are then provided to research organizations to investigate the causes and consequences of human diseases, develop more effective preventive measures, improve diagnostic tests, and optimize therapeutic approaches.
The collaboration between the LCSB and OSMU is an excellent opportunity to change the ideology of the approach to the performance of research projects at our University, to introduce large-scale innovative ideas into the methodology of the main research principles for studying various diseases, not only the neurodegenerative nosological spectrum, but also a real chance of mastering the understudied area of biomedicine in the Russian Federation with all the expected benefits. The signing of the Cooperation Agreement between the two scientific institutions can be viewed as a new stage in the development of Russian medical science and as a symbiosis of applied fundamental principles with breakthrough information technologies.
In the photo (L-R): Pavel Negoduiko– IT specialist;
Rudi Balling - Director of the LCSB;
Aleksey Rozhdestvensky – Head of Neurology Department at OSMU;
The final part of the visit was held with the participation of key representatives of selected areas of the project in a summary format. Further steps to bring the parties closer by increasing the interaction points in the main and complementary areas, the sequence of actions of OSMU employees within the Parkinson's disease research project, including changes in the registration and systematization of clinical aspects of pathology using electronic cards (RedCap), initial sequencing of the genome of 100 patients with PD on the basis of the ICBFM SB RAS are planned.
Aleksey Rozhdestvensky – Head of Neurology Department at OSMU
During the working visit and communication with foreign colleagues and partners, despite the discussions and controversial points, the tone of the event remained businesslike and positive. The project participants, implementing the programme of the two-day visit of the Siberian delegation, showed a genuine interest in cooperation and with maximum concentration and attention approached the discussion of all the finer points of the forthcoming joint work.
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OSMU employees express deep gratitude and respect to LCSB staff for the perfectly organized and successfully conducted scientific session, the university's management and the OSMU International Affairs Department for the opportunity to participate in the authoritative scientific event.
Roman Delov - Associate Professor of Neurology Department at OSMU