Project description
Host-directed approach to cure invasive fungal infections
Invasive fungal infections (IFIs) represent a major threat in immunocompromised and critically ill adult and paediatric patients. Experts believe that a host-directed approach could help to improve the current situation. The EU-funded HDM-FUN project proposes a transdisciplinary approach to identify critical factors for host-directed medical interventions in IFIs. The overall objective is to identify host-pathogen factors essential for immunotherapy and prophylaxis, so as to enable the design of novel therapeutic and preventive host-directed medicine approaches for patients with lethal invasive fungal infection in intensive care. HDM-FUN brings together leading scientists and clinical researchers to study genetics and transcription host factors, metabolome and microbiome immune modulators and host pathogen interactions at molecular and cellular level that determine the susceptibility and treatment outcome of patients with fungal infection.
Objective
Despite novel treatment options and development of diagnostic tools invasive fungal infections (IFI) are still associated with an unacceptably high mortality and morbidity. Experts believe that a host directed approach is needed to overcome this problem. HDM-FUN proposes a transdisciplinary approach to identify host-pathogen factors (HPFs) needed for host directed medical interventions in IFI and will be the first of its kind.
The overall concept is to identify host-pathogen factors in the setting of immunotherapy and prophylaxis that will allow the design for tailored novel therapeutic and preventive host-directed medicine approaches for patients with lethal invasive fungal infection in the intensive care.
Specific objectives:
1. To identify host-pathogen factors that correlate with disease, and correlate them with preventive or immunotherapy- based strategies to stratify patients for personalized host-directed treatment options.
2. Two clinical trials of host-directed medicine approaches; an immunotherapy trial in patients with candidemia and a prospective observational trial for prophylaxis in patients with influenza at risk for aspergillosis.
3. To set-up a centrally managed biobank with samples of the patients enrolled in both clinical trials, and to standardize experimental procedures, protocols and centralize analysis.
4. To establish a unique infrastructure aimed to: explore host-directed medicine approaches in IFI, evaluate their impact on patients and health care, translate research efforts to clinical practice by designing point of care tests and teaching medical professionals.
HDM-FUN brings together top scientists and clinical researchers to unravel host factors (genetics and transcription), immune modulators (metabolome, microbiome), and host pathogen interactions (genetics, metabolomics, immunology, signalling pathways, phagosome biogenesis, and inflammasome regulation) that determine the susceptibility and outcome of patients with fungal infection.
Fields of science
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.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
6525 GA Nijmegen
Netherlands