What is ArchiMed ?

The interdisciplinary ArchiMed project takes its inspiration from the observation that many historic medical collections represent untapped gold mines for contemporary translational research, and for understanding the development of diseases that still affect present-day societies. But how can these ‘dormant’ medical collections be turned into modern biobanks that can be used for research?

 

To answer this question, we are working on the Geneva Brain Bank, located at the Belle-Idée Psychiatric Hospital, and on the University of Strasbourg’s pathology tissue archive. These two collections span the entirety of the twentieth century and enable us to conduct research on both human tissue specimens and the paper records associated with them. We are focusing on a model disease in which we have extensive expertise: neurosyphilis.

Our approach consists of the following: 1) being able to analyse histopathological and genomic biomarkers in historic specimens; 2) developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted model for rapidly and efficiently exploiting a large volume of data; 3) establishing a usable proof of concept to show that the data obtained can be exploited for contemporary clinical research; and 4) offering contextualised understanding of the categories on which these collections were established. We will use tools borrowed from data science, AI, molecular biology, histopathology, clinical medicine, history and the medical humanities.