A digital biomarker for the responsiveness of the immune system to cell death

Digital biomarkers are parameters that can be extracted from data acquired by digital devices such as time series and videos that indicate the presence of a specific disease.
Cell death is a biological process whose dysregulation yields to pathological conditions such as inflammation and cancer. Several end-point assays to count how many cells undergo cell death were developed. These assays were pivotal to assess disease severity or to quantify the effect of drugs on induction/inhibition of cell death.
However, a methodology that accounts for the response of immune cells towards the sites of cell death is missing. This is particularly important to evaluate the degree of inflammation caused by cell death, and pathological alterations of the tissue linked to the recruitment of immune cells such as fibrosis.
In this proposal we aim at filling this gap by developing a digital biomarker that quantifies the response of innate immune cells to death events. This will be achieved using an image-based approach that analyzes the trajectories followed by immune cells and a mathematical method that correlates them with cell death events by computing a response index. This will provide a marker to evaluate drug effectiveness or disease progression.