Macrophage logical modeling

The Disease Maps Project is designed as a large-scale community effort. It is a network of groups that work together in order to better understand disease mechanisms. The project exchanges best practices, share information, develop tools to make it easier for all the involved groups to achieve their goals.

Here we share resources and best practices to develop a disease map for COVID-19. The project is progressing as a broad community-driven effort. We aim to establish a knowledge repository on virus-host interaction mechanisms specific to the SARS-CoV-2. The COVID-19 Disease Map is an assembly of molecular interaction diagrams established based on literature evidence.

In this study, we integrate COVID19 Disease Maps curated regulatory information in a macrophage logical model. This allows logical simulations of the effects of acute inflammation caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, both in general and in a cell-specific perspective. Moreover, understanding the regulatory network behavior of macrophages following infection opens new ways to test and predict drug and drug combination effects, as a first step towards the development of new treatments.