September 2023

Osteoarthritis is the most common degenerative joint disease characterized by the destruction of the hyaline cartilage that covers bone surfaces. From the QUAES chair - Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona we organised a Scientific Coffee on September 22, 2023 to talk about this pathology, which affects 10% of the general population in Spain. Thanks to: ✔️ Jordi Monfort Faure (Hospital del Mar) ✔️ Jerome Noailly (Universitat Pompeu Fabra - Barcelona) ✔️ Josep Vergés Milano (OAFI, Fundación Internacional de Artrosis) ✔️ Anna Garcia- Elias (Cetir Ascires) In total, 34 people attended from the Valencian Association of People Affected by Arthritis (AVAAR), the Spanish Association with Osteoporosis and Osteoarthritis (AECOSAR), the Valencia Arthritis and Osteoporosis Association and the Association of Family and Community Medicine.

UPF

Francesco Gualdi is the Early Stage Researcher 8 - PhD candidate in the European Project “Disc4All”. He completed his bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Ferrara with a thesis focused on the characterization of cells coming from intervertebral disc (IVD). He graduated with honors from the University of Verona in 2021 with an M.Sc. in molecular and medical biotechnology. In parallel to his academic career, he had many working experiences as employee and teacher. His Disc4all Project aims to prioritize genes involved in Lumbar Disc Degeneration and to organize the amount of genetic information related to disc degeneration and its comorbidities to better understand its genetic basis and possibly to identify new biomarkers and therapeutic approaches to the disease.

Maria Paola Ferri is the Early Stage Researcher 3 - PhD candidate in the European Project "Disc4All". She graduated in 2018 in Biotechnologies, from the University of Rome La Sapienza, and in 2021 she obtained the Internation Master degree in Bioinformatics from the Alma Mater University of Bolumn. Her master thesis was focused on the creation of Cloud architectures designed to support and instantiate Bioinformatics applications, curing the portability and the user-friendly access to them. Right now, she is holding a position in the Life Science's Department at the BSC (Barcelona Supercomputing Center). Her role in the Disc4All project would be to extend the implementation of the IDD identification and prediction software in development into a Cloud and HPC environment, so to create in the end a portable and ready-to-use front-end workflow in the LBP (low back pain) investigation, for user and non-experts.

Francis Chemorion is the Early Stage Researcher 1 - PhD candidate in the European Project "Disc4All". He is ensuring collection of data from large data infrastructures, curating it with secondary data from models and simulations to come up with a robust integrated model which will be the basis of a central repository for the project with secured remote access and a comprehensive Data Governance framework. He is passionate about data and its use in powering innovation in research. He designs & develops modern enterprise data architectures by leveraging business intelligence tools, big data tools and creative problem solving. He develops software and systems that enable clients to surface information from their systems and draw insights that drive decision making.

Andrea Nüesch is the Early-Stage Researcher 7 – PhD candidate in the European Project “Disc4all”. Andrea graduated at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) with a bachelor’s degree in Health Sciences and Technology, followed by a master’s degree in 2021 with focus on medical technology. For her master’s thesis, she joined the AO Research Institute Davos, where she was part of the group for Intervertebral Disc Regeneration where she investigated the influence of the secretome of primed mesenchymal stromal cells on Interleukin (IL) -1 stimulated Nucleus Pulposus cells. Currently, Andrea is based in the Biomolecular Sciences Research Centre (BMRC) at the Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom. The focus of her research is the experimental exploration of the microbiome in degenerated intervertebral discs.

Congratulations to these education grantees and Paola Bermudez Lekerika! The grants were awarded to highly motivated and talented young investigators to attend the EORS Annual Meeting #EORS2023 in Porto, September 27-29! We look forward to meeting you there soon!

Roger Compte Boixader is the Early Stage Researcher 6 - PhD candidate. He studied a Biotechnology BSc and a Bioengineering MSc at Insitute Quimic de Sarrià (IQS) at Ramon Llull University in Barcelona. He undertook a MSc thesis at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston where he developed methodologies to study osteoarthritic knee cartilage function recovery from mechanical stimuli and the administration of medication. He joined Disc4All with the aim to assemble and further improve his skills. He looks forward to contributing to Disc4All by analysing the relationship of the gut microbiome and host genetics with disc degeneration through data driven approaches.

Sai Natarajan is the Early Stage Researcher 5 - Ph.D. candidate in the Disc4All European Project. He graduated in 2019 with a degree in Integrated Masters in Computer Applications from SSSIHL, India. Soon after, he started working as an independent researcher in the areas of image segmentation and generative modeling at Zentralklinik, Germany where he developed tools for understanding shape variations and structural changes in the Lumbar Spine. His current position is based at 3D-Shaper Medical and also at the University of Pompeu Fabra. His main focus of research areas include deep learning-based subject-specific segmentation and 2D-3D reconstruction of shape from single-view images. Reconstruction of the vertebral and disc bodies could lead to the finite element analysis for disc degeneration.

Dimitrios Lialios is the Early Stage Researcher 2 – PhD candidate in the European Project “Disc4All”. He graduated from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering and specialization in computational methods in structural analysis. His current position is based in Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). His research revolves around the computational aspects of simulating an Intervertebral Disc (IVD). From the development of a poro-visco-hyperelastic numerical model that can run on Alya, BSC’s finite element solver, to the development of an Agent Based (AB) solver that simulates the expression of proteins related to IVD degeneration and finally, their coupling over simulating a highly accurate in-silico model of the IVD. All the applications are optimized for High Performance Computing (HPC).