Section: Highlights of the Year

Highlights of the Year

Funding by PIA3 of the Bordeaux Graduate’s School in Digital Public Health, headed by Rodolphe Thiébaut. This Master/PhD program is built with the expertise coming from the Inria Sistm project team and in collaboration with several other teams (MONC, CARMEN, PHOENIX).

Successful application of integrative analyses tools on high dimensional immunogenicity data from an Ebola vaccine trial with identification of early correlates of later antibody responses [30]

We published a milestone paper in Biometrics comparing descriptive models (Marginal structural models) and mechanistic models (Ordinary differential equations with mixed effect models on parameters). This is impactful as it shows that mechanistic models can adequately estimate a treatment effect in time-varying confounders settings as it is in observational studies. This opens the perspective of in silico trials based on predictions based on the analysis of available cohorts. [26]

We published a robust and powerful statistical method to analyzed longitudinal RNAseq data, largely outperforming state-of-the-art methods. With the surge in RNAseq data production, e.g. in system vaccinology, this principled methodology has a broad impact in deepening our understanding of underlying molecular mechanisms in various contexts, paving the way for further biological innovation. [16]

Awards

The University of Bordeaux Initiative of Excellence (IdEx) and Zellidja travel grants for a research PhD student visit of 3 months to the CSIRO's machine learning Data61 team, Canberra, Australia (Perrine Soret).