Angel Mary George

Title: Personalisation of Relapse Risk in Autoimmune Disease

Supervision Team: Mark Little, TCD / John Kelleher, TU Dublin/ Declan O’Sullivan, TCD/ Alain Pitiot,  Ilixa Software

Student Name: Angel Mary George

Description: The PARADISE study targets development of a clinical decision support tool that personalises immunosuppressive drug (ISD) therapy in autoimmune disease. Using ANCA vasculitis as the exemplar condition and leveraging off the Rare Kidney Disease registry and biobank, we will focus on deep phenotyping of the patient in remission. At this time point, we hypothesise that residual sub-clinical immune system activation renders the patient at high risk of subsequent relapse of the disease. Conversely, reversion of the immune system to a healthy resting state may indicate a very low flare risk. By using a novel semantic web technology, we will integrate clinical, patient app-derived and multi-modal biomarker data streams to generate explainable machine learning models that predict the risk of flare. These will inform the physician about increasing ISDs or, indeed, discontinuing them altogether. We envisage that this assessment will reduce both relapse and ISD-associated infection, reduce healthcare costs, increase quality of life and build human capital in a research area of importance to Ireland.