During the virtual ECIM 2021 the recipient of the FDIME Research Grant 2019 has presented his achievements.
After a short introduction on the aims and activities of FDIME Daniel Sereni, (FDIME President) announced the 2019 winner Francois Rodrigues, resident internal medicine in Paris, who wanted to spend time in Leeds at the Institute of Rheumatic and Musculoskeletal Research to build a collaboration between two institutes. The period of investigations was intended to be from January up to October 2020.
The research is about a rare familial inflammatory disease. The aim of the project is to better understand the way inflammatory cells are stimulated ; this could lead to the finding of therapeutic targets.
Below you can read more details for doctors and scientists and of course also for other interested readers.
The initial project was on courier transfer of blood samples of patients with TNF receptor associated periodic syndrome (TRAPS). He learned several laboratory techniques, but before the first patient arrived both laboratories in Paris and Leeds were close because of Covid 19. He resumed his work in September 2020 with a new project: Multiple cell isolation (neutrophils, B cells, T cells, monocytes) from whole blood of patients with UBA1 mutations, RNA sequence compared with Sanger sequencing somatic mutation with different impacts according to cell lines using FACS. And then again the FACS facilities were closed. In between some more techniques were learned. The question was: Is metabolism different between white type HEK cells and HEK cells transfected with TRAPS variants? This has not yet been confirmed now, but the collaboration between the Paris and Leeds institutes will be resumed at due time.