Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM)

Established in 1956, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), an Institute of Eminence, is known both nationally and internationally for excellence in technical education, basic and applied research, innovation, entrepreneurship and industrial consultancy. IIT Madras has been the top-ranked engineering university in India for the past 5 years. The Centre for Integrative Biology and Systems medicinE (IBSE) at IIT Madras is a vibrant interdisciplinary group comprising faculty and students from Biotechnology, Computer Science and Chemical Engineering departments. By applying tools from various engineering domains, we investigate exciting biological questions emerging from the massive amounts of biological and clinical data being currently generated. Our broad areas of research have application to the bioprocess and pharma industries, medicine and healthcare. IBSE is also an integral part of the Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBCDSAI) at IIT Madras. RBCDSAI comprises faculty from several departments across the Institute, with research in various areas of data science and artificial intelligence. RBCDSAI is pre-eminent interdisciplinary research centre for Data Science and AI in India with the largest network analytics, deep reinforcement learning, and the most active natural language processing and deep learning groups.

Main roles in project

IITM will establish and manage the data warehouse in India for all data generated in India with harmonised and standardised data curation and analysis methods across India and EU. We will perform integrated analysis of immunological data generated from the INCENTIVE-QIV trials and from the 3 trials on the COBRA vaccines in different populations in India. We will retrieve all the required immune response, conventional and systems serology, T, and B and immune cell analyses, and metadata generated including transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome data for in-depth immunological and integrated statistical analysis to identify immune biomarkers of responders versus non-responders to inform future vaccine design and to establish immunogenicity profile of COBRA vaccines for the Indian population. IITM will also contribute to the management and coordination of the consortium as a work package leader.

Contact: Prof. Himanshu Sinha

This project has received funding from the European Union H2020 (grant no. 874866) and the Dept. of Biotechnology, Govt. of India (project no. BT/IN/EU-INF/16/AP/19-20/11746)