Despite decades of neurodegenerative disease (ND) research, the real molecular pathophysiology of the disease is still poorly understood, and treatments remain inadequate. Remarkably little attention is paid to the involvement of environmental factors, which are known from epidemiological studies to strongly impact ND development. Air pollution, a massive public health issue known to pose a major threat to human health, is an important, ever-increasing global concern. A growing body of evidence from epidemiological and controlled animal studies shows that exposure to air pollutants also impairs the brain. Furthermore, living in highly polluted areas is associated with exacerbated cognitive dysfunction and ND. Many questions remain unanswered as mechanistic information on air pollutant effects on the brain is scarce. Importantly, biomarkers for air pollution and ND risk prediction do not currently exist, thus hindering the identification and stratification of individuals at risk for harmful air pollution effects.
This workshop aims to investigate the novel, ambitious hypothesis that the pollutant exposure environment of an individual alters cellular mechanisms and functions, resulting in the expression of measurable biomarkers. By identifying biomarkers, the individuals with increased ND risk can be stratified prior to the disease onset and preventive measures can be targeted to the specific at-risk populations in order to be most effective.
This workshop brings together a unique combination of expertise and state-of-the-art and innovative methods and tools in neurobiology, epidemiology, clinical science, environmental science and neuro-bioinformatics. The invited talks and the accepted papers will focus on providing crucial mechanistic insight about the effects of air pollutants on the brain in humans and discover biomarkers for air pollution and ND risk prediction. Computational methods are included will regard precision medicine approaches to stratify individuals into subgroups for risk estimation and future ND prevention, advanced single cell and spatial transcriptome analysis pipeline, multi-omics analysis, image genetics methodologies, ultimately aiming to target air pollution-induced effects in those individuals that can most benefit from them.
This workshop addresses the computational neuro-bioinformatics innovations in a major societal challenge with wide health-related, environmental, economic, scientific, social, and political impact.
The workshop will focus on the topic of air pollution and neurodegenerative diseases. It will cover the following topics and others related to them.
1)The biological evidence linking air pollution exposure and neurodegenerative diseases
2)Computational methods to combine genetics and imaging to better understand brain disorders
3) Computational methods to study the environmental exposures and neurodegenerative disease
4) Epidemiological studies on air pollution and neurodegenerative disease
5) Computational methods for efficient single-cell analysis
6) Computational methods for efficient spatial transcriptomic data analysis
7) Single-cell analysis in neurodegenerative disease
8) Multi-omics single cell in neurodegenerative disease
Electronic submission of full papers: Sept, 25, 2021
Notification of paper acceptance: Oct 25, 2021
Camera-ready of accepted papers: Nov 15, 2021
Workshop - BIBM 2021 co-located: Dec. 9-12, 2021
Rosalba Giugno, University of Verona, Italy
Vincenzo Bonnici, University of Verona, Italy
Katja Kanninen, University of Eastern Finland, Finland
Gianfranco Politano, Politecnico di Torino, Italy
Pietro Sala, University of Verona, Italy
TBC
Simone Avesani, University of Verona, Italy
Samuele Cancellieri, University of Verona, Italy
Manuel Tognon, University of Verona, Italy
To be defined.
For CINI InfoLife members only, a meeting with relative brainstorming will be held during the workshop.
Martin Hemberg, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK
Katja Kanninen, University of Eastern Finland, Finland
Anna Oudin, Umeå University, Sweden
Please, follow instructions and submit via the on-line paper submission link
Papers should be formatted to 8 pages IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscript Formatting Guidelines (https://www.ieee.org/conferences/publishing/templates.html).