Targetid

TargetID: Novel Drug Targets for Infectious Diseases is a University of Malta project funded through the COVID-19 R&D Fund 2020 jointly administered by the Malta Council for Science & Technology and Malta Enterprise.

TargetID: Novel Drug Targets for Infectious Diseases huwa proġett li qed isir minn l-Università ta’ Malta b’fondi nazzjonali mill-COVID-19 R&D Fund 2020 amministrati mill-Kunsill Malti għax-Xjenza u t-Teknoloġija u Malta Enterprise.

Ultimately we still rely heavily on thought processes to analyse genomic and transcriptomic data - not just for the development of a strategy and the bioinformatic pipelines but also to interpret the results. The bioinformatic pipelines we developed are giving us promising outputs - shortlists of genes from 86 families that we have analysed amongst which are some that could be involved in severe Covid19. We are currently reanalysing those lists, seeing what biological pathways the highlighted genes fit into, getting hints from literature to select those that are most promising as drug targets and drawing our final conclusions as the TargetID project draws to a close.

TargetID: Novel Drug Targets for Infectious Diseases is a University of Malta project funded through the COVID-19 R&D Fund 2020 jointly administered by the Malta Council for Science & Technology and Malta Enterprise.

Measure a hundred times and cut once

A Maltese proverb teaches us to plan well and consider all aspects before starting a project. The most crucial step in planning a multi-omic study is deciding how to collect and process the biological samples. TargetID uses samples from the Maltese Acute Myocardial Infarction Study funded through the MCST R&I 2008 Programme. These samples were collected with meticulous attention to details. Participants were fasted and asked not to smoke for a number of hours before blood sampling, postponing collection if they had recent infection, vaccination or surgery, collecting samples within a specified timeframe at the same time of day, collecting blood with the participant in the same position, rapid processing of sample. These are just some of the precautions taken to have data that is comparable between one sample and another. This is particularly important for transcriptomic, metabolomic and proteomic work. The plan for the ethics framework of a project is also crucial. Once taken, these decisions determine the suitability of a sample collection for specific applications. It pays to plan well!

TargetID may be a springboard, but it also builds on the successes of several past University of Malta projects including:

- European Regional Development Funds (ERDF) 081: Enhancing Health Biotechnology Facilities at the University (https://investinginyourfuture.gov.mt/project/research-science-and-technology/enhancing-health-biotechnology-facilities-at-the-university-33947675) which involved multiple departments at the University fo Malta (UM) and helped equip our labs;

- the Maltese Acute Myocardial Infarction (MAMI) Study in which we collected data and samples from around 1000 research subjects (National R&I Programme 2008 organised by the Malta Council for Science and Technology ),

- The Malta Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Project where we started work on high throughput sequencing ( National R&I Programme 2012),

- the EU Twinning project TrainMALTA led by Dr Rosienne Farrugia where students and staff at the University of Malta received training in Bioinformatics and functional work from researchers at the University of Cambridge (UCAM) and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven) (https://www.um.edu.mt/r/projects/trainmalta).

Like a stepping stone each of these helped us move forward. It is amazing to see the years of work and preparation by so many people that leads us to today where we are developing and using bioinformatic tools to analyse 1000 whole genomes and transcriptomes to understand diseases better and find new drugs to treat them.