Journal des maladies infectieuses et de la médecine

Understanding the Origins of Infectious Diseases and Epidemics Using an Integrated Systems Biology Approach

Abstract

Patrice Kabamba

The COVID-19 pandemic has been ravaging the globe for more than two years, and it has put the responses of all major international governments to pandemic situations to the test. The molecular mechanisms that result in heterogeneous patient outcomes and the reasons of post-COVID state are two important areas of research that are still not fully understood (AKA Long-COVID). In this study, we introduce the HYGIEIA initiative, which uses a multi-omic strategy assisted by network medicine to address the immense problems posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is envisaged that the logistics used in this study, in addition to investigating COVID-19, will be adaptable to additional infectious agents, pandemic-like scenarios, as well as other complicated, non-infectious disorders. We first review prior studies on COVID-19 in the context of the microbiome, host genome, viral genome, proteome, metabolome, and transcriptome. We next go over a suggested methodology for a large-scale multi-omic longitudinal study that would use mass spectrometry (MS) and high-throughput sequencing (HTS) to look at the aforementioned biological strata. Last but not least, we go over how a network medicine strategy may be utilised to evaluate the data and uncover important findings, with the ultimate goal being the implementation of these findings into clinics to enhance patient care.