Section: Partnerships and Cooperations

Regional Initiatives

BioProLor

The Orpailleur team is member of the BioProLor consortium composed of 5 enterprises and 7 academic research teams. This consortium is funded for 2 years (2010-2012) by the AME (“Agence pour la Mobilisation Economique”). The objective of BioProLor is the design of a production filière for compounds with high added-value which originate from plants in Lorraine. The Orpailleur team and the associated start-up “Harmonic Pharma” are in charge of the computational aspects of this research work.

In addition, a CIFRE contract (2009-2012) was set up with Harmonic Pharma for funding the thesis of Emmanuel Bresso on the following subject: “Organisation et exploitation des connaissances sur les réseaux d'interactions biomoléculaires pour l'identification de gènes candidats et la caractérisation de profils d'effets secondaires de principes actifs”.

Contrat Plan État Région” (CPER)

The links between the Regional Administration and LORIA are materialized through an administrative contract called “Contrat Plan État Région” (CPER) running from 2007 to 2013. The associated scientific program is called “Modélisations, informations et systèmes numériques” (MISN) and includes two tracks in which the Orpailleur team is involved.

• “Modeling Bio-molecules and their Interactions” (MBI).

  This project is coordinated by Marie-Dominique Devignes (http://bioinfo.loria.fr ) and the general objective is to study how domain knowledge can be taken into account for improving modeling of biomolecules and their interactions, and how, in sequence, this guides the modeling of biological systems. Six scientific projects are currently under development and involve collaborations with computer scientists, and people working either in biology or chemistry.

  An Inria experimental research platform is currently developed in the framework of MBI (http://bioinfo.loria.fr/Plateforme%20MBI ). This platform is aimed at sharing data and computing resources. Its specific features are relative to biomolecules modeling, classification, and to data integration for data mining. In parallel with the bioinformatics platforms in Strasbourg, Reims, Lille, and Nancy-INIST, it constitutes the North-East node of RENABI (“Réseau National des Plateformes Bioinformatiques”).

• “Traitement Automatique des Langues et des Connaissances” (TALC).

  TALC stands for “Automatic Processing of Languages and Knowledge”. The general objective is to study the relations existing between knowledge discovery, knowledge representation, reasoning, and natural language processing. In this framework, the Orpailleur team plays an important role as the research themes are closely related to those of the team. Actually, research projects are currently under development on knowledge management and decision support in the large involving in particular the Kasimir and the Taaable systems.