GenHotel – European Research Laboratory For Rheumatoid Arthritis

#Genomics / Postgenomics #Biotherapies #Bioinformatics / Mathematics

• Human genetics
• Multifactorial diseases
• Genomic variants
• Genetic statistics
• Computational systems biology

Rheumatoid arthritis, the most common autoimmune disease, is a painful chronic rheumatism that leads to progressive joint destruction. This multifactorial disease involves a large number of genetic factors, many of which have not yet been characterized.

GenHotel’s goal is to determine the multifactorial determinism of rheumatoid arthritis by studying genetic and environmental factors in patients and their families.

The final objective is to contribute to new drug target development, with a view to preventing and curing this disease.

The research methodology will be extended to other diseases having a major impact on public health. In this context, GenHotel’s activity is focused on characterization of genomic variants at risk for the studied phenotype. These sequence variants or structural variants are identified from NGS data of familial samples.

Furthermore, combination studies are performed on clinical, genomic and environmental data.

Finally, GenHotel will develop a computational systems biology approach using laboratory-produced data to characterize regulation networks.

These analyses are essential for the characterization of interactions between all the known risk factors of rheumatoid arthritis.

• COLLABORATION / CHAIRE

  GenHotel is involved in several collaborations on the Genopole campus, notably with the National Center for Research in Human Genomics (JF Deleuze, see page 34), and with the Laboratory for Mathematics and Modeling – Évry (LaMME, Genome & Statistics team).

  GenHotel is in close contact with several clinicians, notably Prof. F. Cornélis (CHU de Clermont-Ferrand), Prof. A. Finckh (HU de Genève, Suisse) and Prof. Michou (CHU Laval, Québec, Canada).

  GenHotel also develops several projects in collaborations on other autoimmune or inflammatory/ rheumatic diseases, such as ankylosing spondylitis (A Boudjema, Oran University USTO, Algeria) and Dupytren’s disease (L Michou, CHUL Quebec, Canada)