Guillermo Hugo López-Campos

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• PhD
• Senior Lecturer in Biomedical Informatics at Queen's University Belfast

The environment's contribution to health has been conceptualized as the exposome. Biomedical research interest in environmental exposures as a determinant of physiopathological processes is rising as such data increasingly become available. The panoply of miniaturized sensing devices now accessible and affordable for individuals to use to monitor a...

Background: Colon cancer patients with the same stage show diverse clinical behavior due to tumor heterogeneity. We aimed to discover distinct classes of tumors based on microarray expression patterns, to analyze whether the molecular classification correlated with the histopathological stages or other clinical parameters and to study differences...

Lactococcus garvieae is a Gram-positive bacterium considered an important opportunistic emerging human pathogen and also a well-recognized fish pathogen. Here, we present the draft genome sequence of Lactococcus garvieae strain 21881 (2,164,557 bp, with a G+C content of 37.9%), which represents the first report of a genome sequence on Lactococcus g...

Pandemic A/H1N1/2009 influenza causes severe lower respiratory complications in rare cases. The association between host immune responses and clinical outcome in severe cases is unknown. We utilized gene expression, cytokine profiles and generation of antibody responses following hospitalization in 19 critically ill patients with primary pandemic A...

To outline the main issues related to the impact of the data generated by the Human Genome Project on health information systems. A major challenge for medical informatics is identified, consisting of adapting traditional systems to new genetic-based diagnostic and therapeutic tools. Reviewing and analysing the different health information levels f...

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies together with increasing economic and care pressures have popularized the use and development of digital health solutions and interventions, in particular in mental health. Associated with this is an increase of demonstrated potential to harm patients. Using case studies showing harms...

Introduction: Participatory Health (PH) emerges as a consequence of the rise of the internet, which has led to a patient-centered approach. Participatory Health Informatics (PHI) uses information technologies and evaluates the use of tools. The emergence of new Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques represents a great advance for PH. The objective...

Despite decades of research and disease burden, RSV remains the most common cause of acute lower respiratory tract infection (ALRTI) in infants <2 years of age. New vaccines and an improved long lasting monoclonal antibody have been approved to protect individuals at increased risk of severe disease. However, treatment of severe RSV-mediated diseas...

Introduction: Rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially with large language models, present both opportunities and challenges in healthcare. This article analyzes real-world AI-related harms in healthcare. Methods: We selected four recent AI-related incidents from the AIAAIC Repository. Results: The incidents discussed include...

Background Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) impacts academics, work and social relationships. Digital interventions, such as virtual reality, games, app and other, offer accessible therapeutic options, yet understanding their efficacy and potential adverse effects is crucial for safe use. The objective of this study is to identify an...

Background: Precision prevention involves using biological, behavioral, socioeconomic, and epidemiological data to improve health for a particular individual or group. With almost 63% of the global population using social media, these platforms show promise to deliver tailored messaging and personalized interventions to individuals. Objectives: To...

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease burden is greatest between six weeks and 6 months of life, with young age the most common risk factor among hospitalised children. A robust innate immune response in the airway epithelium is crucial for mitigating RSV-associated disease, but early-life immune responses to infection remain largely unexplored...

The World Health Organization’s Operational Framework for Climate Resilient and Low Carbon Health Systems outlines 10 broad components for the development and maintenance of health systems that respond effectively to climate-related challenges. This work analyses the WHO framework from a participatory health informatics perspective and identifies s...

Interferons (IFN) constitute a primary line of protection against mucosal infection, with IFN research spanning over 60 years and encompassing a vast ever-expanding amount of literature. Most of what is currently understood has been derived from extensive research defining the roles of “classical” type I IFNs, IFNα and IFNβ. However, little is know...

The application of digital interventions in healthcare beyond research has been translated in the development of software as a medical device. Along with corresponding regulations for medical devices, there is a need for assessing adverse events to conduct post-market surveillance and to appropriately label digital health interventions to ensure pr...

Gram-negative bacteria use type VI secretion systems (T6SSs) to antagonize neighbouring cells. Although primarily involved in bacterial competition, the T6SS is also implicated in pathogenesis, biofilm formation and ion scavenging. Enterobacter species belong to the ESKAPE pathogens, and while their antibiotic resistance has been well studied, less...

Motivation: Digital therapeutics (DTX), i.e., health interventions that are provided through digital means, are increasingly available for use; in some countries, physicians can even prescribe selected DTX following a reimbursement by health insurances. This results in an increasing need for methodologies to consider and monitor DTX’s negative cons...

Background: Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) represents a transitory status of immunoparalysis, and we hypothesized that ventilator-associated tracheobronchitis (VAT) could share also some degree of immune response to a respiratory infection. Research design and methods: A prospective observational study in five medical ICUs to evaluate imm...

Human phenotypes define the healthy or diseased status of an individual and they arise from the complex interactions between environmental and genetic factors. The whole set of human exposures constitute the human exposome. These exposures have multiple sources including physical and socioeconomic factors. In this manuscript we have used text minin...

During the last century technological advances have increased the number of anthropogenic electromagnetic fields (EMFs) and therefore human exposures. In this work we have mined from more than 30,000 EMF-related publications the genes, diseases and molecular mechanisms associated with the exposure to six different subsets of EMFs. Results show 3653...

Background: Health care has evolved to support the involvement of individuals in decision making by, for example, using mobile apps and wearables that may help empower people to actively participate in their treatment and health monitoring. While the term "participatory health informatics" (PHI) has emerged in literature to describe these activiti...

Klebsiella pneumoniae is a leading cause of nosocomial and community acquired infections, making K. pneumoniae the pathogen that is associated with the second largest number of deaths attributed to any antibiotic resistant infection. K. pneumoniae colonizes the nasopharynx and the gastrointestinal tract in an asymptomatic manner without disseminati...

Klebsiella pneumoniae is a leading cause of nosocomial and community acquired infections, making K. pneumoniae the second pathogen associated with the most deaths attributed to any antibiotic resistant infection. K. pneumoniae colonises the nasopharynx and the gastrointestinal tract in an asymptomatic manner without dissemination to other tissues;...

We found that histamine (10⁻⁹ M) did not have any effect on the in vitro capture of Escherichia coli by neutrophils but accelerated its intracellular killing. In contrast, histamine (10⁻⁶ M) delayed the capture of Escherichia coli by neutrophils and reduced the amounts of pHrodo zymosan particles inside acidic mature phagosome...

Continuous advancements in biotechnology are generating new knowledge and data sources that might be of interest for the insurance industry. A paradigmatic example of these advancements is genetic information which can reliably notify about future appearance of certain diseases making it an element of great interest for insurers. However, this info...

Since the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in November 2019, there has been an exponential production of literature due to worldwide efforts to understand the interactions between the virus and the human body. Using an “in-house” developed script we retrieved gene annotations and identified phenotype enrichments. Human Phenotype Ontology terms were retrieve...

Text mining of the biomedical literature enables vast quantities of information to be extracted and summarised. Here we describe an updated and improved version of previous methodology for the analysis of gene and protein biomarkers that enables the use of the newer Pubtator Central annotations, based in full text, improving the performance using a...

The field of phenomics has a range of biomedical informatics tools such as the Human Phenotype Ontology, providing a structured vocabulary with relationships between abnormal phenotype terms. Artificial intelligence has been widely used for entity extraction and tagging large corpora of text from PubMed and is reflected in applications such as Phen...

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic disease with unknown pathophysiological mechanisms. There is evidence of the role of microorganims in this disease development. Thanks to the open access to multiple omics data, it is possible to develop predictive models that are able to prognosticate the course and development of the disease. The inte...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, was identified in late 2019 and caused >5 million deaths by February 2022. To date, targeted antiviral interventions against COVID-19 are limited. The spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 infection ranges from asymptomatic to fatal disease....

SARS-CoV-2 can efficiently infect both children and adults, albeit with morbidity and mortality positively associated with increasing host age and presence of co-morbidities. SARS-CoV-2 continues to adapt to the human population, resulting in several variants of concern (VOC) with novel properties, such as Alpha and Delta. However, factors driving...

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, was identified in late 2019 and went on to cause over 3.3 million deaths in 15 months. To date, targeted antiviral interventions against COVID-19 are limited. The spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 infection ranges from asymptomatic to fat...

SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve, resulting in several ‘variants of concern’ with novel properties. The factors driving SARS-CoV-2 fitness and evolution in the human respiratory tract remain poorly defined. Here, we provide evidence that both viral and host factors co-operate to shape SARS-CoV-2 genotypic and phenotypic change. Through viral whole-ge...

Diabetic endotheliopathy is the main cause for impaired angiogenesis and reduced neovascularization that lead to microvascular injury and vascular complications. The pathogenic basis for vascular complications arising from diabetes is complex. Elucidation of key underlying mechanisms will help the development of novel therapies and the discovery of...

Exposome research is focused on all the exposures individuals experience during their lifetime and how it shapes their health and development of disease. The chemical and biological aspects of the exposome are readily available in data formats. In comparison there is a lack of data frameworks available for physical factors (e.g. noise, lighting, el...

In recent years, microbiota has become an increasingly relevant factor for the understanding and potential treatment of diseases. In this work, based on the data reported by the largest study of microbioma in the world, a classification model has been developed based on Machine Learning (ML) capable of predicting the country of origin (United Kingd...

Objective Preeclampsia is a cardiovascular complication characterised by the new onset of hypertension and proteinuria or other end-organ dysfunction. Currently there are no effective treatments for preeclampsia except delivery of the placenta and the baby, often pre-term. Administration of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) has shown therapeutic potent...

Phenotypes are the result of the complex interplay between environmental and genetic factors. To better understand the interactions between chemical compounds and human phenotypes, and further exposome research we have developed “phexpo,” a tool to perform and explore bidirectional chemical and phenotype interactions using enrichment analyses. Phex...

Context Preeclampsia is a leading cardiovascular complication in pregnancy lacking effective diagnostic and treatment strategies. Objective To investigate the diagnostic and therapeutic potential of the angiogenesis markers, FKBPL-CD44, in preeclampsia pathogenesis Design and Intervention FKBPL and CD44 plasma or placental concentration was deter...

The growing amount of available public data repositories containing a plethora of rich chemical and biomedical information is enabling new in silico research avenues. In this project we aim to link human genome variations and the exposome applying in silico biomedical informatics approaches to analyse the potential effects of those variants in the...

Sepsis results in various patient complications and is due to a heightened inflammatory response against infection. This condition requires further exploration of biomarkers. We employed an "in silico" method comprised of text-mining and additionally clinical validation through the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care. We highlight that Fact...

In this work we have analysed the use of two different correlation metrics and two different datasets, detecting differences in the extent and directionality of the correlation between COVID-19 infection and BCG immunization. Correlation between COVID-19 infection, death rates and BCG immunization is strongly affected by the correlation metrics and...

Objective: Most diseases result from the complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors. The exposome can be defined as a systematic approach to acquire large data sets corresponding to environmental exposures of an individual along her/ his life. The objective of this contribution is to raise awareness within the health informatics co...

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death globally. People living with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) have a three times higher risk of developing CVD, particularly heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), for which there is no treatment. The need for tangible interventions has led to investigations into a number of...

Objectives Preeclampsia is a cardiovascular pregnancy complication which occurs in 5-10% of pregnancies that can lead to a number of pregnancy complications including maternal and foetal death. Long-term, preeclampsia is associated with up to 8-fold increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) for both mothers and their offspring. The lack of mec...

Objectives Preeclampsia is a cardiovascular pregnancy complication which occurs in 5-10% of pregnancies that can lead to a number of pregnancy complications including maternal and foetal death. Long-term, preeclampsia is associated with up to 8-fold increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) for both mothers and their offspring. The lack of mec...

Background: Interactions between transcription factors and DNA lie at the centre of many biological processes including DNA recombination, replication, repair and transcription. Most bacteria encode diverse proteins that act as transcription factors to regulate various traits. Several technologies for identifying protein-DNA interactions at the ge...

Pre-eclampsia is a pregnancy condition affecting 5-10% of pregnancies, and it is the leading cause of death in pregnancy associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease later in life. Despite research, the pathogenesis of pre-eclampsia is still poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate the overlapping pathogenic mechanisms between p...

Exposomics is a field of research which is receiving growing attention. In this work, we characterize the exposome research landscape and update our previous study of formal knowledge representation approaches to this field. We applied a deductive analysis using the National Center for Biomedical Ontology Recommender for comparability of the result...

Background: During last years, there has been an intensive search for blood biomarkers in schizophrenia to assist in diagnosis, prognosis and clinical management of the disease. Methods: In this study, we first conducted a weighted gene coexpression network analysis to address differentially expressed genes in peripheral blood from patients with...

Background Almost all infants are infected with RSV by 2 years. 1–3 % of RSV-infected infants are hospitalised with severe disease. Reasons for susceptibility to severe disease remain obscure. We aimed to identify factors that might explain such susceptibility. Methods We generated well-differentiated primary nasal epithelial cell (WD-PNEC) cultur...

Impaired therapeutic responses to anti-inflammatory glucocorticoids (GC) in chronic respiratory diseases are partly attributable to interleukins and transforming growth factor β1 (TGF-β1). However, previous efforts to prevent induction of GC insensitivity by targeting established canonical and non-canonical TGF-β1 pathways have been unsuccessful. H...

Table S1. RNA-Seq Source Data Met the Criteria for Genome-wide Transcriptomic Analysis (Containing 8 Sheets), Related to Figure 1 Sheet 1: Dex-regulated 569 genes vary under different conditions. Sheet 2: Comparison of significantly changed gene number between TGF-β1+Dex group and Dex-alone group. Sheet 3: Summary of significantly changed genes in...

Table S3. FunRich Analysis of TGF-β1-Impaired Dex-Regulated Genes (Including 2 Sheets), Related to Figure 1 Sheet 1: FunRich analysis of TGF-β1-impaired Dex-induced genes. Sheet 2: FunRich analysis of TGF-β1-impaired Dex-repressed genes.

Cathepsin S (CatS) is upregulated in the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). However, its role in CF lung disease pathogenesis remains unclear. In this study, β-epithelial Na ⁺ channel-overexpressing transgenic (βENaC-Tg) mice, a model of CF-like lung disease, were crossed with CatS null (CatS −/− ) mice or treated with the CatS inhibitor...

Aim: Despite current advances in therapies and the gradual decline in breast cancer-related mortality, metastasis remains a major therapeutic challenge for treatment. Energy reprogramming is now recognized to be an important part of tumorigenic processes, but its relevance in metastatic dissemination has yet to be elucidated. Methods: Using the MDA...

Background: Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) is one of the most commonly encountered intensive care unit (ICU) acquired infections worldwide. The objective of the study was to identify the immune alteration occurring in patients suffering from VAP at the transcriptomic level and explore its potential use for clinical diagnoses of this disease...

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy thickens heart muscles reducing functionality and increasing risk of cardiac disease and morbidity. Genetic factors are involved, but their contribution is poorly understood. We used the hypertrophic heart rat (HHR), a unique normotensive polygenic model of cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure to investigate the role of...

HIV-1 induces changes in the miRNA expression profile of infected CD4+ T cells that could improve viral replication. HIV-1 regulator Tat modifies the cellular gene expression and has been appointed as an RNA silencing suppressor. Tat is a 101-residue protein codified by two exons that regulates the elongation of viral transcripts. The first exon of...

Analysis of the Dicer and Drosha mRNA expression levels. mRNA encoding for Dicer or Drosha were measured by qRT-PCR in total RNA samples obtained Jurkat-Tat72 and Jurkat-Tat101 compared to control cells. The histograms represent the fold change media of three independent experiments. Statistical significance was calculated with Kruskal-Wallis test...

Transcription factors with putative binding sites in the promoters of the miRNAs’ precursors deregulated in Jurkat-Tat cells (Number of elements = 66). (DOCX)

Description of the putative binding sites for cellular transcription factors located in the promoter of hsa-miRNAs differentially expressed in Jurkat-Tat101 cells. The predictive analysis was performed in the DNA sequence of the promoters of all the miRNAs that were upregulated in Jurkat-Tat101 using TESS and ConSite web sites. The putative sites f...

Primers used for the pRT-PCR quantification of the miRNAs precursors deregulated in Jurkat-Tat, the target mRNAs PTEN, PDCD4, and CDKN1B, HIV-1 Tat and β-Actin. (DOCX)

Experimentally supported targets of hsa-miR-21, -222, -29a, and -1290. (DOCX)

Intracellular expression of Tat101 and Tat72 proteins in Jurkat cells. (A) Analysis by qRT-PCR of mRNA levels of Tat in Jurkat-Tat101 and Jurkat-Tat72 cells in comparison with the expression of Tat in Jurkat E6-1 cells infected with NL4-3_wt after 7 days-infection. Media and SEM of three independent experiments is represented. (B) Analysis by immun...

Objectives: To identify common methodological challenges and review relevant initiatives related to the re-use of patient data collected in routine clinical care, as well as to analyze the economic benefits derived from the secondary use of this data. Through the use of several examples, this article aims to provide a glimpse into the different ar...

Glucocorticoids are commonly used to prevent chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting despite a lack of understanding of their direct effect on cancer progression. Recent studies suggest that glucocorticoids inhibit cancer cell migration. However, this action has not been investigated in estrogen receptor (ER)-negative breast tumour cells, although...

Lactococcus garvieae is the aetiological agent of lactococcosis, a haemorrhagic septicaemia that affects marine and freshwater fish, with special incidence and economic relevance in farmed rainbow trout. Water temperature is one of the most important predisposing factors in the development of lactococcosis outbreaks. Lactococcosis in trout usually...

Scientific advancement and the development of new research fields bring uncertainties about what the current topics of research emphasis are and thus, what new knowledge might need to be represented. The exposome is an example of one such new field for which these uncertainties exist. The exposome is the analogue to the genome, from an environmenta...

Biomedical informatics plays a key role in the development of precision medicine and other new technology-enabled health disciplines. In this context, the exposome (defined as the whole set of exposures on an individual) has become a relevant topic. Although most of the research work in the exposome area has been conducted around the physical and c...

Biomedical informatics plays a key role in the development of precision medicine and other new technology-enabled health disciplines. In this context, the exposome (defined as the whole set of exposures on an individual) has become a relevant topic. Although most of the research work in the exposome area has been conducted around the physical and c...

Scientific advancement and the development of new research fields bring uncertainties about what the current topics of research emphasis are and thus, what new knowledge might need to be represented. The exposome is an example of one such new field for which these uncertainties exist. The exposome is the analogue to the genome, from an environmenta...

Objectives: The availability of internet-connected mobile, wearable and ambient consumer technologies, direct-to-consumer e-services and peer-to-peer social media sites far outstrips evidence about the efficiency, effectiveness and efficacy of using them in healthcare applications. The aim of this paper is to describe one approach to build a progr...

Objectives: To reflect on the recent rise of Digital Medicine, as well as to analyse main research opportunities in this area. Through the use of several examples, this article aims to highlight the new role that Biomedical Informatics (BMI) can play to facilitate progress in research fields such as participatory and precision medicine. This paper...

Background: Left ventricular (LV) hypertrophy is a risk factor for cardiovascular death, but the genetic factors determining LV size and predisposition to hypertrophy are not well understood. We have previously linked the quantitative trait locus cardiac mass 22 (Cm22) on chromosome 2 with cardiac hypertrophy independent of blood pressure in the s...

Contact: guillermo.lopez@unimelb.edu.au.

With advancements in genomics technology, health care has been improving and new paradigms of medicine such as genomic medicine have evolved. The education of clinicians, researchers and students to face the challenges posed by these new approaches, however, has been often lagging behind. From this the Genomic Medicine Game, an educational tool, wa...

With advancements in genomics technology, health care has been improving and new paradigms of medicine such as genomic medicine have evolved. The education of clinicians, researchers and students to face the challenges posed by these new approaches, however, has been often lagging behind. From this the Genomic Medicine Game, an educational tool, wa...

The development of new methods, devices and apps for self-monitoring have enabled the extension of the application of these approaches for consumer health and research purposes. The increase in the number and variety of devices has generated a complex scenario where reporting guidelines and data exchange formats will be needed to ensure the quality...

Auditory hallucinations (AH) are clinical hallmarks of schizophrenia, however little is known about molecular genetics of these symptoms. In this study, gene expression profiling of postmortem brain samples from prefrontal cortex of schizophrenic patients without AH (SNA), patients with AH (SA) and control subjects were compared. Genome-wide expres...

To describe the importance of bioinformatics tools to analyze the big data yielded from new "omics" generation-methods, with the aim of unraveling the biology of the pathogen bacteria Lactococcus garvieae. The paper provides the vision of the large volume of data generated from genome sequences, gene expression profiles by microarrays and other exp...

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) from social media use in chronic disease management continue to emerge. While many published articles suggest the potential for social media is positive, there is a lack of robust examination into mediating mechanisms that might help explain social media's therapeutic value. This study presents findings from a globa...

In the last decade we have witnessed the raising of the exposome (the set of a life-long individual exposures) as an increasingly interesting area and discipline due to its relationship with health. These new approaches rely heavily in the use of different informatics related methods and are generating new data types that in the future should be ha...

The development of new methods, devices and apps for self-monitoring have enabled the extension of the application of these approaches for consumer health and research purposes. The increase in the number and variety of devices has generated a complex scenario where reporting guidelines and data exchange formats will be needed to ensure the quality...

Objectives: Given the quickening speed of discovery of variant disease drivers from combined patient genotype and phenotype data, the objective is to provide methodology using big data technology to support the definition of deep phenotypes in medical records. Methods: As the vast stores of genomic information increase with next generation seque...

Every year new databases and tools for the storage and analysis of biological data are developed, updated, and discontinued. For this reason it is very important to have a clear picture of the major repositories providing information about the availability of these databases and tools as well as a brief description of them. This chapter provides an...

Objective: Cardiac hypertrophy (CH) is the main risk factor for heart disease after age. Multiple genetic factors are known to be involved but still poorly understood. We have previously described a quantitative trait locus (QTL) cardiac mass 22 (Cm22) on chromosome 2 which influences heart size independently of blood pressure. Our aim was to deter...