Projects
Running projects
Federated Health [2023 – 2025]
Through this project, Nordic Innovation seeks to demonstrate a concrete solution utilizing the
patient records across Nordic countries in solving healthcare challenges.
Electronic health record (EHR) systems contain an estimated 40-80% of data in unstructured form (Dalianis 2018). This means much of the context provided by digital health information systems cannot be easily exploited for improving patient care, cost efficiencies or generating new knowledge.
This project proposes an innovative, language-agnostic privacy-preserving solution that utilizes clinical text data in multiple Nordic languages, in addition to structured data, to create a scalable and sustainable federated health data network.
Funding: Nordic Innovation
European pre-T1D Registry [2023 – 2024]
The long-term goals are to improve clinical care in people with islet autoantibodies and accelerate trials for the prevention of Stage 3 T1D. To achieve this, the project aims to design and establish a master database serving multiple European countries.
The project will establish a registry of children and adults with islet autoantibodies. The REGISTRY aims to be maximally inclusive and, therefore, require minimal information for entry, but have increasing data strata to facilitate analysis and trial recruitment. THE REGISTERY will actively support staging and minimal follow-up to encourage update.
Funding: Helmsley Charitable Trust
REACT [2022 – 2026]
Lower respiratory tract infections resulting from seasonal epidemics and pandemics are among the leading causes of death globally. Treatments are largely supportive showing a need for identifying novel targets for interventions and prediction models to personalize treatment. The REACT consortium unites high-level experts in virology, immunology, clinical medicine, epidemiology, and bioinformatics that through assessing genotypic, high-dimensional immunophenotypic, demographic and clinical data aim to define host-pathogen interactions of influenza, RS virus and SARS-CoV-2.
We aimed to evaluate genotypic, high-dimensional immunophenotypic, demographic, and clinical data in the context of the disease course to define host-pathogen interactions of viral respiratory tract infections, focusing on predominant viruses, i.e., influenza, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and severe acute respiratory virus (SARS-CoV-2), to predict the course of the disease, to allow targeting and personalisation of treatments, the identification of therapeutic targets, as well as defining and improving vaccination efforts.
Funding: EU Horizon 2020
RISK-HUNT3R [2021 - 2026]
The project builds on the outcomes of its previous flagship project, EU-ToxRisk (ending by the end of 2021). It aims to develop a new sustainable framework for next generation risk assessment in human health context. Based entirely on non-animal methods, this project will provide human-centric chemical safety assessment support in a reliable, efficient and cost-effective manner. The Brunak Group is contributing through toxigenomic web app development and transcriptomics analysis.
Funding: EU Horizon 2020.
FOREVER [2021 - 2025]
The vision of the Finding Ophthalmic Risk and Evaluating the Value of Eye exams and their predictive Reliability (FOREVER) project is to improve eye health as well as general health of the aging population.
The group builds an interactive platform for consolidating data information from extensive eye examinations, questionnaires, blood pressure measurements and wide range of imaging data, genetic information and data in the Danish National Health Registries.
The goal of the project is to investigate the links between the diseases impacting eye health and the background participants’ conditions to better understand the life-long mechanisms that lead to issues in the general health of the aging population.
Funding: Synoptik.
TRANSLATE [2020 - 2025]
The project aims to implement genetic information directly into patient care to improve diagnosis and treatment of non-autoimmune diabetes. This project is the first large-scale implementation of systematic genetic testing within common, non-communicable, chronic disease in Denmark and hope to improve personalized medicine in Denmark.
Funding: Innovation Fund Denmark.
NNF Challenge Grant [2018 - 2024]
The project, 'Big life-course data analytics for understanding disease initiation and progression in diabetes and its complications' focuses on longitudinal data analysis, which is essential to relate patient trajectories covering many subsequent illnesses to biomarker data from the omics domain.
Funding: Novo Nordisk Foundation.
Upcoming events: 4-5 September Big Data in Biomedicine NNF Challenge Symposium
BIOMAP [2019 - 2024]
BIOMAP aims to shed new light on the underlying causes of two serious skin diseases: atopic dermatitis and psoriasis, as well as the genetic and environmental factors that influence how a patient’s disease will progress and how well they will respond to a given treatment. This project will accomplish this by studying the data from afflicted patients as well as healthy individuals using advanced molecular techniques and newly developed tools in bioinformatics. The Brunak Group is contributing through disease trajectory analysis of patients from the Danish National Patient Registry.
Funding: EU Horizon 2020.
BrainDrugs [2019-2024]
BrainDrugs is a thematic research alliance within precision medicine in epilepsy and depression. The project is anchored at Neurobiology Research Unit with Prof. Gitte Moos Knudsen as Director. The overall aim of BrainDrugs is to establish which key features predict drug response in patients with epilepsy or major depression disorder (MDD). Søren Brunak is a member of the executive board and leader of the work package evolving around electronic health record (EHR) data. The Brunak group has access to EHRs from the Capital region and region Zealand from 2006-2016 and from the specialized national epilepsy hospital, Filadelfia. The Brunak group has multiple contributions to BrainDrugs. One of our focuses is on validating ICD-10-coded epilepsy diagnoses and phenotyping focal and generalized epilepsy types based on extraction of information contained in EHRs via text-mining for establishment of better characterized epilepsy cohorts for further epidemiological studies. Another study is focusing on extraction of symptoms from EHRs of epilepsy patients and incorporation hereof in disease-symptom-disease-trajectories for stratification and better characterization and prediction of disease course.
Funding: Lundbeck Foundation.
Clinical Academic Group (CAG) Heart
A collaboration between medical doctors and researchers that works towards more efficient and precise diagnostic and individualized treatment of heart patients.
Funding: Novo Nordisk Foundation and Greater Copenhagen Health Science Partner.
PM-Heart [2019 - 2023]
The PM-Heart project will develop and clinically implement personalized medicine (PM) with the dual purpose of avoiding futile overtreatment as well as undertreatment in ischemic heart disease. Being a Nordic collaboration the project will make it feasible to target this heterogeneous patient group and make it possible to cross-validate and benchmark the results in a new and unprecedented, robust manner.
Funding: Nordforsk/Innovation Fund Denmark.
INNODIA Harvest [2020 - 2024]
The project builds on the results from INNODIA and runs high-performance clinical trial network, running academic and industry-driven trials alongside small, biomarker-rich intervention trials to examine pathobiological pathways to type 1 diabetes.
Funding: IMI and others
INNODIA [2015 - 2023]
An INNOovative approach towards understanding and arresting Type 1 DIAbetes (INNODIA). INNODIA is an international consortium with the overall objective to advance in a decisive way how we predict, evaluate and prevent the onset and progression of type 1 diabetes (T1D), by creating novel tools, such as biomarkers, disease models and clinical trial paradigms. It is a consortium under the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), and consists of 26 academic institutions and clinics, 4 industrial partners (EFPIA), 2 patient organizations and one SME.
The group worked with 31 academic institutions, 6 industrial partners, SMEs and 2 patient organizations to build a standard platform for running comparable and reproducible studies and trials in Type 1 Diabetes with human participants. INNODIA is a one-of-its-kind project that brings novel multiomic integrative data analysis to better understand the mechanistic processed in and around transition into Type 1 Diabetes. The project involves running phase 2 clinical trials where whole range of -omics data is being collected and will be analyzed against unaffected family members to try to identify key biomarkers of interest involved in prediction and, hopefully one day, slowing down or treating T1D.
Funding: IMI and others
DIRECT Legacy [2021 – ]
DIabetes REsearCh on patient straTification (DIRECT) is a pan-European consortium on pre-competitive research under the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). The project aims to identify biomarkers and define subtypes with rapid diabetes development and progression as well as altered response to diabetes treatment.
Funding: IMI and others
ImmunAID [2018 - 2024]
The ImmunAID project aims to deliver a method for rapid and accurate diagnosis across all spectrums of systemic autoinflammatory diseases (SAIDs) to improve the clinical management of patients. ImmunAID has recruited patients throughout Europe and generated a deeply phenotyped dataset via a combination of unbiased multi-omics approaches and hypothesis-driven assays exploring inflammasome, inflammation resolution, and immune networks. The Brunak group is involved in genomics and proteomics data quality control, as well as multi-omics data integration across diseases and fuzzy clustering of the patients diagnosed with “Inflammation of Unknown Origin”. The goal is to better stratify and/or assign these patients to known SAIDs, and identify new biomarkers that can be used for new therapy. Furthermore, this would help reduce misdiagnoses.
Funding: EU Horizon 2020.
COVID-19 sex difference [2020 - 2023]
The project aims to identify the genetic explanation for why more men (2/3) than women die from COVID-19, focusing on X-linked variants. In this collaborative work with the Tommerup group at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, the Brunak group gather and integrate data from clinical sources and registries and performed bioinformatics analyses of various kinds such as disease trajectories, sequence variation, and mechanistic analysis of protein complexes.
Funding: Independent Research Fund Denmark.
The Danish COVID-19 genetic consortium [2021 - 2023]
The project aims to identify genetic alterations explaining why some people get very ill from the coronavirus and suffer from late complications, whereas others do not. Many research groups at the University of Copenhagen, Statens Serum Institut, and Rigshospitalet are active participants of this consortium. In the Brunak group we are focusing on the disease trajectories impacting COVID-19 related outcomes. In addition, we analyzed the consortiums contribution to the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative (HGI) and the COVID-19 HGI Long-COVID Working Group.
Funding: Sygesikring Danmark
Completed projects and outcomes
EOSC-Nordic Initiative [2019 - 2022]
The projects aim to facilitate the coordination of European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) relevant initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries and exploit synergies to achieve greater harmonization at policy and service provisioning across these countries.
Funding: EU Horizon 2020.
EU-STANDS4PM [2019 - 2022]
The EU-STANDS4PM project will establish a pan-European Expert forum with two main objectives: (i) to assess and evaluate national standardization strategies for interoperable health data integration as well as data-driven in silico modelling approaches and (ii) to harmonize and develop universal (cross-border) standards as well as recommendations for in silico methodologies applied in personalized medicine approaches.
Funding: EU Horizon 2020.
EU-ToxRisk - In a large (€ 30 million) H2020-supported collaborative project, academia joins forces with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), large industry, contract research organizations and regulatory bodies to achieve a paradigm shift in toxicology towards a more efficient and animal-free chemical safety assessment.
Link Lives
The Link Lives project will collect historical disease data on the majority of families residing in Denmark from 1787 to 1968, which was the year the Civil Registration System was introduced. They will subsequently analyse and compare the old data from before 1968 with new data. This way, the researchers hope to gain insight into disease patterns and be able to identify correlations across generations, for example in connection with deaths due to cancer.
Funded by Innovation Fund Denmark.
RHAPSODY -
The goal of RHAPSODY is to define a molecular taxonomy of type 2 diabetes mellitus that will support patient segmentation, inform clinical trial design, and the establishment of regulatory paths for the adoption of novel strategies for diabetes prevention and treatment.
ELIXIR-CONVERGE is a project funded by the European Commission to help standardise life science data management across Europe. To achieve this standardisation, the project will develop a data management toolkit for life scientists.
The toolkit will help ensure more research data is in the public domain, which will give scientists access to more data. This will allow them to discover new insights into the challenges facing society, such as food security and health in old age, and help stimulate innovation in biomedicine and biotechnology.
* Projects updated June 2023