Longitudinal multi-omic profiling to provide a molecular map of human stroke

Stroke is a leading and increasingly important cause of death and disability in the EU. Yet, we have only few effective treatments and an unsatisfactory understanding of human stroke pathophysiology. Current diagnostic algorithms fail to capture pathophysiological mechanisms in daily clinical practice, hindering the allocation of patients to treatments and the development of novel therapies. While stroke care algorithms rely on clinical and single-timed imaging assessments, thousands of proteins and metabolites circulate within the blood representing a neglected window into our body. With MAP-STROKE, I aim to leverage serial multi-omics, longitudinal imaging, and deep clinical phenotyping data from the recently completed PROMISE study (N>500) to create a molecular map of human ischemic stroke and to identify novel clinically meaningful molecular biomarkers. By combining multiple unique project features including i) a novel molecular conceptualization of stroke, ii) the integration of genomic, proteomic and metabolomic data, iii) high-frequency serial assessments, iv) longitudinal imaging and phenotyping, and v) novel bioinformatics methodology including multi-omic factor analysis, MAP-STROKE goes considerably beyond the current state-of-the art and will advance personalized medicine in stroke. The MSCA fellowship under the mentorship of Dr. Steffen Tiedt at the Institute for Stroke and Dementia Research at LMU Munich would give me the exceptional opportunity to apply and expand my bioinformatics expertise in molecular modeling towards more complex multimodal biomedical data and to develop the skillset needed to become an expert and eventually independent group leader in medical bioinformatics in Europe. I envision the identified molecular biomarkers to drive precision medicine in stroke and to reduce its societal and economical burden.