More tailored medicine The MoReHealth project is being launched in Lower Saxony to improve personalised medicine

There is an ever-increasing amount of health data available. However, the analysis of this data to extract and interpret meaningful information is not yet fully developed. This is also the case with so-called multi-omics data, which includes, for example, all of a person’s genes and proteins. This data can help diagnose diseases, develop tailored therapies and monitor treatment success. It needs to be standardised and generated, processed and managed in a quality-controlled manner so that it can be used more efficiently and sustainably. This is where the MoReHealth project, in which Technische Universität Braunschweig is also involved, comes in.

The MoReHealth project is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and the Volkswagen Foundation with three million euros as part of the zukunft.niedersachsen programme. This joint project of the Lower Saxony institutions Hannover Medical School (MHH), University Medical Centre Göttingen (UMG), TU Braunschweig, the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) and the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) is coordinated by Prof. Dr. Thomas Illig and Dr. Sara Haag at the MHH. It will start on 1 September 2025 and run for four years.

MoReHealth was created on the initiative of the Translational Alliance in Lower Saxony (TRAIN) and the RESIST Cluster of Excellence. Researchers want to investigate the age-related susceptibility of older people to infection, building primarily on an existing collection of health data in the RESIST Cluster of Excellence, which is stored in the SHaReD database. To this end, additional data, including from patients, will be collected and the database will be further developed into a multi-omics database for the whole of Lower Saxony.

“The methodological approach we are developing in MoReHealth will make a significant contribution to the successful implementation of future large-scale multi-omics studies at various locations in Lower Saxony,” says Professor Illig. The project team is using a practical example to better standardise multi-omics approaches: the aim is to identify biomarkers that predict the risk and severity of herpes virus infection in older people. This should enable the development of new approaches to prevention, diagnosis and therapy.

The investigations are largely based on data obtained as part of the RESIST Cluster of Excellence – in a study involving 650 citizens from the Hanover region (senior individuals cohort) and a cohort of people who have developed shingles following infection with herpes viruses (varicella zoster cohort). The aim is to transfer the methodological approach of the practical example to other clinical pictures at a later stage.

TRAIN is a network for translational health research consisting of university and non-university research institutions in Hanover-Braunschweig-Göttingen. RESIST consists of around 60 research groups working together to better understand individual susceptibility to infections in order to prevent, diagnose and treat infections in a ‘tailored’ manner.