Objective
Our proposal is to develop new treatment strategies for Invasive Aspergillosis (IA) which has become the major infectious complication of treating haematological malignancies with intensive chemotherapy or haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT). It meets the criteria of the call by addressing a disease with a significant economic cost due to "resistance" to treatment with available agents and high associated mortality. Ineffective host immune responses facilitate fungal invasion of the pulmonary system and other vital organs leading to death.
In order to redress this immunological imbalance we propose to develop new immunotherapeutic strategies which will augment current antifungal treatments and reduce morbidity and mortality. We plan to study high risk patients undergoing allogenetic HSCT to prove our hypothesis that immunotherapy is efficacious. Facilitated by recent publication of the Aspergillus fumigatus (the principal pathogen of the genus) genome sequence we will exploit new knowledge and techniques in genomics and proteomics. We will identify the immuno-logically important fungal targets to aid design of immunotherapies based on vaccines using fungus-primed innate immune cells, monoclonal antibodies or adoptive transfer of specific T lymphocyte clones. We will also generate new nucleic acid based diagnostic tests to inform when and how immunotherapy can be optimally applied.
The findings generated will be of great relevance to treatment of haematological malignancies throughout the EU by significantly reducing HSCT related mortality, by allowing more intensive cancer treatment regimens to be used leading to higher remission rates, and will also be applicable to other patient populations at risk of IA. The outcomes will have strong commercial applications which will be delivered by three leading European SMEs within the consortium.
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.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social sciencessociologydemographymortality
- medical and health sciencesmedical biotechnologycells technologiesstem cells
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugsvaccines
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicineimmunologyimmunotherapy
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicinetransplantation
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Call for proposal
FP6-2005-LIFESCIHEALTH-7
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
STREP - Specific Targeted Research ProjectCoordinator
WUERZBURG
Germany