BIOMAP

by Sarah Lucas

BIOMAP has released an animated clip illustrating the project work to alleviate the burden and consequences of Atopic Dermatitis and Psoriasis for people living with the diseases.
Since the project launch in 2019, more than 30 leading international players from academia, pharma industry and civil society have joined forces to improve direct disease management by combining clinical, genetic and epidemiological expertise with modern molecular analysis techniques and newly-developed tools in bioinformatics.

The project works towards providing further research evidence about both diseases to alleviate the burden and consequences for people living with the conditions by addressing three unmet needs, which will have a broad impact on disease management, patient-directed care strategies and future trial designs:

• The identification of major determinants of manifestation, progression and comorbidity development
• An improved understanding of overlapping or unique disease mechanisms, associated signatures and their importance in patient subpopulations
• The identification of markers capable of assessing disease-related individual patient trajectories and response to different therapies.

During the first two years of the project, the BIOMAP partners have made significant progress in achieving the project’s objectives. Following still on-going experimental work, the consortium has taken a considerable step forward by making sure their data collections adhere to stringent rules governing patient data privacy. A significant legal step and major achievement was the signature of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) by all partners. The MoU serves as a joint controllership agreement and governs data controllers and data processor’s respective roles and responsibilities both within the project and with respect to the patients whose personal data are processed. Following the highest standards of data protection and security measures the project partners are now able to access and upload the datasets to their central data platform. Please visit biomap-imi.eu or follow @Biomap_IMI on Twitter for more information on the project. The clip is available on the BIOMAP project website (https://biomap-imi.eu) and YouTube.