Project: Profiling vulnerability and resilience for mental illness following viral infections: translating epidemiology to deep-phenotyping.

Acronym	VIRAL-MI
Project Topic	Infections are associated with an increased risk to develop mental illness (MI), and individuals with pre-existing MI are much more likely to suffer from both mental and severe physical adverse outcomes (e.g., hospitalization and death) after infections.To identify the underlying risks and protective factors against adverse outcomes after infection, in our transnational research project we will exploit two existing wide epidemiological cohorts in Norway and Israel, and three deeply-phenotyped cohorts of patients with severe and/or acute post-infectious (COVID-19) MI in Italy, Norway and Belgium. Epidemiological data will be utilised to generate hypotheses by exploring broad bidirectional associations between infections and severe MI, and by profiling highly vulnerable versus highly resilient individuals likely to develop severe outcomes. Multimodal neuroimaging, genetics and immunoinflammatory data will then be exploited to test these hypotheses, understanding underlying mechanisms, in deep-phenotyped cohorts of patients. Two clinical proof-of-concept studies will be conducted to identify the biological pathways (i.e. transcriptomics) linked to potential druggable targets associated with MI. Cutting edge machine learning procedures will stratify patients into vulnerable and resilient sub-groups, and personalized predictive models will be computed to provide clear targets for new therapeutic and preventive strategies.
Network	NEURON Cofund2
Call	Neuron Cofund2 Joint Call 2023

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	IRCCS San Raffaele Sceintific Institute	Coordinator	Italy
2	University of Haifa	Partner	Israel
3	University of Oslo	Partner	Norway
4	University of Antwerp	Partner	Belgium