ENISI: Paragon of gut immunity modeling
Scientists are unsure as to the exact cause of the disease, but one thing is certain: without further research, IBD will continue to be a costly and difficult problem. VBI has developed information biology approaches to investigate the role of genes, microbiome and immune responses on IBD as well as gut infections.
Long a mysterious region of the body, the human immune system, the gut microbiome and their interactions have become central in our efforts to understand this debilitating and widespread disease. Because of the fragility of the human gut, it has often been impossible to understand how autoimmune diseases like IBD manifest or become chronic.
“ENISI provides first-in-class information processing representations of the mucosal immune system that meets the challenge of today’s clinical needs by connecting immunological parameters and gut microbiome with health outcomes,” said Josep Bassaganya-Riera, Director of the Nutritional Immunology and Molecular Medicine Laboratory.
VBI researchers use ENISI to help them build accurate models of the human gut from cells to systems. ENISI MSM allows users to observe immune responses as they happen in real time, overlay immune responses, changes in gut micribiome composition with tissue pathology and health outcomes, and create accurate models that will predict how cells will respond under certain stresses and treatments. In this way the tissue-level models can be integrated with molecular-level models.
“ENISI is the first of its kind to model at the individual cell level with this many cells,” Keith Bisset, simulation and systems software development scientist at VBI’s Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory.
Developed under the auspices of the transdisciplinary Modeling Immunity to Enteric Pathogens (MIEP) project, this revolutionary software allows researchers to perform experiments in silico in ways that have never been possible before, identifying promising leads that guide and underpin pre-clinical and clinical research. The computational models and experiments create a knowledge discovery cycle wherein the models identify promising leads in the lab, and experimental and clinical work provides more information to fine-tune and validate the model.
Such models may become particularly important as the government moves toward the 21st Century Path to Cures model, in which the discovery, development, and delivery of better treatments and cures are of utmost priority.
ENISI moves us forward on that path, toward healthcare systems that are enabled by modeling and informatics-driven simulations. It’s the first step in the next scientific revolution, a future in which computers play just as much of a role as wet-lab experimentation and enable end-to-end precision medicine solutions.
About NIMML
The NIMML Institute is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit public charity foundation focused on a transdisciplinary, team-science approach to precision medicine at the interface of immunology, inflammation, and metabolism. The NIMML Institute team has led numerous large-scale transdisciplinary projects and is dedicated to solving important societal problems by combining the expertise of immunologists, computational biologists, toxicologists, modelers, translational researchers, and molecular biologists. The Institute is headquartered in Blacksburg, VA. For more information, please visit www.nimml.org or contact pio@nimml.org.