Disease Maps – EISBM

Disease Maps Project

The Disease Maps Project as a large-scale open community effort was initiated by the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine, the Institut Curie and the European Institute for Systems Biology and Medicine.

In order to better understand disease mechanisms, we use a direct approach and develop knowledge-based both machine- and human-readable comprehensive representations of disease mechanisms – disease maps. A disease map is an expert-approved pathway-based reconstruction customised for a particular disease, a graphical review on the molecular mechanisms of a disease. It is a collection of interconnected signalling, metabolic and gene regulatory pathways stored in standard formats such as (SBGN, SBML, BioPAX).

An important part of this project is the involvement of domain experts, clinicians and biologists, with extensive expertise in a particular disease. This way we ensure the quality of the developed resources.

The disease maps are to be used for omics data interpretation and identification of disease subtypes, biomarkers, corresponding molecular mechanisms and drug targets. They are to be used as the basis for different types of mathematical models and in-silico experiments.

Within the Disease Maps Project community, the EISBM Projects Team is focused on asthma mechanisms, as well as on developing tools and general solutions that can be used by the community for building maps and using them for data interpretation and clinical applications.