Dr. Laure-Alix Clerbaux: Vortrag "Depicting the pathogenesis of COVID-19 using the Adverse Outcome Pathway"

The 6th Webinar in the 3Rs training series, organized by the Animal Protection Commissioner of Berlin and the Johns Hopkins Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT), in collaboration with the Veterinary Chamber of Berlin, will take place on Monday, September 27 at 7 pm CEST.

free registration

Dr. Laure-Alix Clerbaux from the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, will give a talk on the CIAO project which aims at modelling the COVID-19 pathogenesis via the Adverse Outcome Pathway framework.

Abstract: Depicting the pathogenesis of COVID-19 using the Adverse Outcome Pathway

The CIAO project addresses a pressing issue in COVID 19 research: Making sense of the overwhelming flood of information that is published every day. To achieve this, CIAO makes use of the Adverse Outcome Pathways (AOPs), which are part of a well-established knowledge collection, management, and dissemination framework in toxicology. Based on published work, the AOPs depict the causal relationships that link an initial perturbation (virus binding to a receptor) over a series of biological key events (KE) toward an adverse outcome, such as respiratory distress or multiorgan failure. Such organization of the knowledge helps to capture the essential biological events and the causal relationships between the stages of the disease as well as the various factors influencing the clinical outcome. Developing AOPs modelling COVID-19 pathogenesis relies on interdisciplinary collaborative effort, synergizing exchange between experts from different fields. Currently, more than 65 scientists from 40 organizations around the world are participating in the project, which is steered by the European Commission, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and Humane Society International (HSI).

Bio:

Dr. Laure-Alix Clerbaux is currently working at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, as co-responsible for running the CIAO project which aims at modelling the COVID-19 pathogenesis via the Adverse Outcome Pathway framework.
Previously, she studied Bioengineering and Chemistry and completed a PhD in Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Sciences at UC Louvain, Belgium. For more than 10 years, she has been investigating molecular and cellular mechanisms leading to liver and intestinal diseases in different labs in Brussels, New York state and Zurich, using various in vitro and in vivo methods and models. She also explored how to integrate in silico and in vitro data related to membrane transporter in chemical risk assessment. Currently, the CIAO project aims at organizing and consolidating the plethora of biological, experimental and clinical data on COVID-19 to better understand the viral disease.