Eirini Tsirvouli

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 project, 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.

We develop macrophage logical models to represent the activation/polarization of this immune cell. Interactions are manually curated with available macrophage literature. The models are mainly built and analyzed in GINsim. But other resources are used to integrate specific pathways or small modules (CasQ software) and to analyze the logical models (CoLoMoTo Notebooks).

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.