Project description
Harnessing the body’s immune system to fight tuberculosis
Tuberculosis (TB), caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, remains a leading cause of death worldwide. The lengthy treatment and the unwanted side effects are often challenging for medication adherence, increasing the risk of drug resistance and necessitating the development of new therapies. The EU-funded ITHEMYC project aims to develop adjunctive TB immunotherapies including monoclonal antibodies, therapeutic vaccines, drugs targeting host-pathogen interactions and immunomodulatory compounds. By integrating in silico modelling with experimental research, the ITHEMYC consortium will test a series of compounds using an integrated portfolio approach. The most promising compounds will be evaluated for efficacy using advanced pre-clinical models. The long-term goal is to advance these compounds for clinical use, reduce treatment duration, decrease side effects and lower current disease relapse rates.
Objective
Tuberculosis (TB) remains the leading cause of death due to a single pathogen, Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb; except in 2020-2022, when it was surpassed by the COVID-19 pandemic), with 1.5 million deaths in 2020. The lengthy TB treatment and the numerous adverse events contribute to poor medical adherence and development of antibiotic resistant strains. Thus, novel therapeutic modalities are urgently needed to shorten treatment duration, improve outcomes and control the emergence of drug resistant TB.
The ITHEMYC project convenes a multidisciplinary consortium of 11 partners, including two Product Development Partnerships (TBVI, TB-Alliance) and an industrial partner (GSK) involved in vaccine, drug and biomarker R&D for TB. The partners will work jointly to develop innovative adjunctive TB immunotherapies by capitalizing on a promising pipeline and recent developments in the field. The project will combine current and new antibiotic regimens with novel immunotherapies, such as small molecules targeting host pathogen-interactions, including host-directed therapies and virulence inhibitors, immunomodulatory compounds, monoclonal antibodies and therapeutic vaccines. The project will generate robust preclinical safety and efficacy information on compounds and combinations through a set of relevant in vitro, in vivo and in silico models, and progress two of them up to preclinical proof-of-concept in non-human primates within the project duration. The partners are proposing a critical path for characterization and progression of immunotherapies, that will be refined based on knowledge generated in ITHEMYC aiming to increase the understanding and interest for this emerging concept of adjunctive TB immunotherapy. We expect the new combined interventions will improve TB cure rates, reduce the duration and toxicity of current regimens and reduce relapse rates.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencesbiological scienceszoologymammalogyprimatology
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic healthepidemiologypandemics
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinepneumologytuberculosis
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugsvaccines
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunologyimmunotherapy
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Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-HLTH-2022-DISEASE-06-two-stage
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
8219 PK Lelystad
Netherlands