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SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science

Published 7 February 2023
DDLS program

The SciLifeLab & Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS) is the is one of the latest research initiative funded by Knut and Alice Wallenberg foundation. Lund University has successfully recruited two DDLS Fellows starting now in the beginning of 2023.

The practice of life science is continuously becoming more data-dependent. The amount and complexity of data is growing exponentially, and more scientific discoveries are enabled when data is openly available to researchers across the world. This is the basis for the DDLS Program. The program is funded with a total of 3.1 billion SEK over 12 years and SciLifeLab, as a national infrastructure for life science, coordinates this program in close collaboration with ten universities (Chalmers, GU, KI, KTH, LiU, LU, SLU, SU, UmU and UU) and the Swedish Museum of Natural History).

The program focuses on four strategic areas for data-driven research, all of which are essential for improving the lives of people as well as animals and nature, detecting and treating diseases, protecting biodiversity and creating sustainability:

  1. Cell and molecular biology
  2. Precision medicine and diagnostics
  3. Evolution and biodiversity
  4. Epidemiology and biology of infections

Newly recruited DDLS Fellows

The program will host, in total, 39 early career group leaders as DDLS fellows, launch over 210 postdoctoral positions and establish a research school for 260 PhDs, within both academia and industry. 20 fellows have been recruited during the first phase and the remaining 19 during the second phase of the program.

Lund University has successfully recruited two DDLS Fellows, Camila Consiglio and Jacob Vogel, in the area of Epidemiology and biology of infections and Precision Medicine and Diagnostics. On behalf of the WCMM Centre in Lund, we wish you very welcome!

Camila Consiglio

Camila Consiglio

What is your background?

I am is a DDLS fellow and group leader of the Systems Immunology Lab at Lund University. I am originally from Brazil, where I obtained my BS and MSc (Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Alegre, Brazil). I obtained my PhD in Immunology at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center (Buffalo, USA) and with a short stay at Institut Pasteur (Paris, France), where I investigated how sex hormone signaling influences immune responses in cancer and during infections. Thereafter, I joined Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm, Sweden) as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow, and utilized computational methods to understand human antiviral immunity. In 2023, I started my own group at Lund University using systems immunology as a data-driven approach to decipher how biological sex impacts human immunity and disease susceptibility. 

In what research area do you work and what are your main aims?

We investigate how biological sex impacts human immunity using systems immunology approaches. Generally, females mount more robust immune responses than males, resulting in lower severity of infections, decreased frequency of cancer, but increased prevalence of autoimmunity. Yet, we do not fully understand the precise mechanisms that underlie such sex discrepancies. My lab combines high throughput multi-omics technologies with state-of-the-art computational methods to understand mechanisms of sex differences in human immunity.

What are the strengths of your research group?

We are now in an era of unprecedented technology development, where the combination of high throughout technologies, longitudinal sampling and clinical data allow for a deep and comprehensive characterization of human health and disease. The future of medical research relies on the ability of scientists to bridge biomedical and computational expertise to deconvolute such complex layers of molecular data and pave the way for delineating novel therapies for infectious and immune-related diseases. Our lab’s strength relies on our ability to combine unique wet and dry lab expertise in systems immunology to bridge this gap, and better understand the emergence, mechanisms, and consequences of sex differences in human immunity.

What is the significance and impact of your research?

Infectious and immune-mediated diseases constitute a high economic and health burden worldwide, which has been recently exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. The most common treatment for respiratory infections is supportive care rather than immune modulation. Thus, there is currently an urgent need for the development of immunotherapies against infectious agents to reduce infection-associated death and morbidity. Uncovering the mechanisms underlying sexual dimorphism in immunity is essential to understanding both infectious and immune-mediated diseases, as well as to better design, optimize and individualize immunomodulatory therapies.

Contact details

Camila Consiglio, PhD
Assistant Professor
Department of Laboratory Medicine
Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS), Lund University
Lund Stem Cell Center

Lund University
Faculty of Medicine
Division of Molecular Hematology
BMC B12, Sölvegatan 17
221 84 Lund, Sweden

Affiliations

  • SciLifeLab
  • Lund Stem Cell Center

Website and Social Media

Jacob Vogel

Jacob Vogel

What is your background?

I had an unusual path to neuroscience, starting as an English/Philosophy major in University before transitioning to Neuroscience. After graduating, I worked as a Research Assistant at University of California, Berkeley. Here, I was indoctrinated into the world of Alzheimer's disease neuroimaging, especially PET imaging. I did my PhD in Neuroscience at McGill University, which focused on data-driven modelling of Alzheimer's disease progression. Here, I also became more familiar with machine learning, imaging-omics and big data neuroinformatics. Each of these skillsets were consolidated during my postdoctoral fellowship at University of Pennsylvania, where I focused on lifespan antecedents of neurodegenerative diseases.

In what research area do you work and what are your main aims?

My lab's main focus is in aging and neurodegenerative disease research, where we take advantage of large data resources to model disease progression and discover contributions to disease pathogenesis. Some of my lab's principal research avenues include characterizing individual difference in disease progression, predicting the neurobiological progression of neurodegenerative diseases, and modelling the earliest biological changes that lead to neurodegenerative syndromes. Our work achieves these goals by blending large neuroimaging and multi-omic datasets, and applying to these datasets supervised and unsupervised methods in statistical learning and disease progression modelling.

What are the strengths of your research group?

Our research group is privileged with a large network of collaborators that help push forward the lab's research goals by providing both expert domain knowledge and rare datasets. This includes the Swedish BioFINDER study, which is one of the premier neurodegenerative datasets in the world. The group boasts a sophistication in many statistical approaches and an expertise in many types of datasets. Finally, we have a commitment to open science, FAIR principals and contributing to the greater research community.

What is the significance and impact of your research?

As a member of the Diagnostics and Precision Medicine arm of DDLS program, my lab's research is focused on questions that can provide insights into disease neurobiology while simultaneously providing immediate clinical value. Part of our research pertains to the development of diagnostic and predictive tools that can be feasibly employed in clinical situations. In addition, our lab's focus on human data means that our research has a fairly short road to clinical translation. One of our overall goal is to provide a comprehensive biological model of how diseases like Alzheimer's disease progress, signposting the relevant biological changes that occur along these trajectories. This will allow not only monitoring of disease progression, but also predictions about clinical progression and insights into aspects of disease physiology that may be targetable for treatment.

Contact details

Jacob W Vogel, PhD
Assistant Professor (Associate Senior Lecturer)
Clinical Memory Research Unit
Department of Clinical Sciences, Malmö 
Lund University

Affiliations

  • SciLifeLab 
  • Department of Clinical Sciences, Malmö 

Website and Social Media

DDLS areas

SciLifeLab, Science for Life Laboratory, is a joint organisation for the advancement of molecular biosciences in Sweden. The backbone is the governmentally funded national research infrastructure through which SciLifeLab provides access to the cutting-edge instrumentation and deep scientific expertise necessary to be internationally competitive within the entire continuum of biology research, from the atomic level all the way to ecosystems.

SciLifeLab has three pillars:

  1. Infrastructure
  2. Research
  3. Data-driven Life Science

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Page manager: lisa [dot] karlsson [at] med [dot] lu [dot] se | 7 Feb 2023