BioLizard Awarded €300,000 VLAIO Research Grant
We are happy to announce the receipt of a €300,000 research grant from Flanders Innovation & Entrepreneurship (VLAIO) to leverage our world-leading expertise in bioinformatics, AI and machine learning, to establish the causal link between the human microbiome and disease.
The growth in researching the microbiome in academia and industry has led scientists to establish associations between microbial populations in the human gut with obesity, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, COVID19, and many more health issues. This suggests that a deeper understanding of the role that the microbiome plays in human health could accelerate research in drug development, biomarker discovery, and nutrition.
Collecting data from the broadest set of microbes, patient background, and interactions, we are building a framework using state-of-the-art bioinformatics and AI tools to evaluate causal links in the human microbiome, purely from data. This will allow evaluation of whether microbe A causes disease B or if they’re only distantly related, thereby requiring a refining of focus.
“This research grant from VLAIO will enable us to build a state-of-the-art framework to discover drug targets and biomarkers supported by real cause-effect relations as part of our bioinformatics service offering to the biopharmaceutical and nutrition industries”
- Liesbeth Ceelen
This excerpt was taken from Flanders.bio, read the original press release here.
