Section: Other Grants and Activities
National initiatives
ANR Nutrivigène
Participants : Mehdi Kaytoue, Florent Marcuola, Amedeo Napoli.
Nutrigenomics is an emerging topic interested in elaborating dietary recommendations and new food products. The Nutrivigène project aims at studying “homocysteine” that is closely correlated with age and associated with vascular, cognitive, and neurological dysfunctions. Homocystéine is an intermediate product of the carbon metabolism and is also related to the status of folate and vitamin B12. The objective of the Nutrivigène project is to study whether, at the cellular level, “hyperhomocysteinemia” produces epigenetic changes of the expression of genes potentially related with the vascular, cognitive and neurological dysfunctions of volunteers of the cohort OASI (people recruited in a rural region of Sicily). The originality of this study consists in identifying the nutrigenomic mechanisms related to homocysteine and its nutritional and genetic determinants that may alter the epigenetic of the expression of genes involved in the vascular, cognitive and neurological functional deterioration of aged people. The evaluation of the association between the methylation of gene candidates (MS-PCR) and the vascular and cognitive function is carried using KDDK methods.
The Nutrivigène project involves the following partners: INSERM U724 (Nancy Hospital) in association with IRCCS of Troina (Italy), INRA Alimentation Humaine (Clermont-Ferrand Theix), UMR CNRS 2738 (Marseille), ERI 11-INSERM Nancy, LSGA (INPL Nancy), LORIA (Orpailleur Team), and finally Nestlé-Waters (Vittel).
ANR Vigitermes: Mining for signal in Pharmacovigilance
Participants : Yannick Toussaint, Jean Villerd.
Pharmacovigilance covers research activities related to detection, analysis, and prevention of unexpected adverse drug reactions (ADR). In France, health-care professionals have to declare serious or unexpected ADRs, while spontaneous reports can be collected in two different ways. The pharmacovigilance units of pharmaceutical laboratories receive spontaneous reports on ADRs that concern the drugs they commercialize. The regional “Pharmacovigilance Centers” collect spontaneous reports on ADRs for all drugs commercialized in France. These reports are registered in the pharmacovigilance national database, AFSSaPS for “Agence Française de Sécurité Sanitaire des Produits de Santé”. At the international level, the WHO for “World Health Organization” Program, which was established in 1968, consists of a network of National Centers, WHO Headquarters, Geneva, and the WHO Collaborating Center for International Drug Monitoring, the Uppsala Monitoring Center (UMC, Uppsala, Sweden). Individual case reports of suspected adverse drug reactions are collected and stored in a common database, presently containing over 3.7 million case reports, in several languages.
The general objective of the Vigitermes project consists in supporting the work of Pharmacovigilance experts –in pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies– in two ways: firstly, in their interaction with available resources, e.g. Pharmacovigilance database, product catalogs, medical literature; secondly, in improving signal detection in pharmacovigilance. This work is based on KDDK methods including knowledge management in pharmacovigilance.
Vigitermes involves 10 partners: DSPIM (Department of Public Health and Medical Informatics of Saint-Etienne), SPIM (INSERM U872, équipe 20), Modélisation Conceptuelle des Connaissances Biomédicales (EA 3888), LIM&BIO (Laboratoire d'Informatique Médicale & Bio-Informatique, EA3969), CRPV of the European Georges Pompidou Hospital (HEGP), TEMIS, Mondeca, INRIA-Orpailleur, and Inalco. The World Health Organisation Uppsala Monitoring Centre for Drug Safety (WHO-UMC) is an associated partner.
