EFCCA is involved in this exciting project that will identify digital endpoints that provide reliable, objective and sensitive evaluation of activities of daily living and Health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in ImmuneMediated Inflammatory Diseases such as IBD as well as other such as Rheumatoid Arthritis and Lupus and which will ultimately have a positive impact on the quality of life of these patients.
Background
Immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs) are an increasing medical burden in industrialised countries worldwide. IMIDs are characterised by an enormous heterogeneity with regard to disease outcome and response to targeted therapies, which currently cannot be adequately anticipated to tailor individual patient management. Hence, a mechanistic understanding of this heterogeneity and the biomarkers that are predictive for disease control and therapy response over time are important prerequisites of future precision medicine in IMIDs.
ImmUniverse has been formed as a European transdisciplinary consortium to tackle these unmet needs and to understand the role of the crosstalk between tissue microenvironment and immune cells in disease progression and response to therapy of two different IMIDs: ulcerative colitis (UC) and atopic dermatitis (AD). Following this unique cross-disease approach, ImmUniverse will fill the gap and the limitations of current studies which do not systematically compare the complex interactions between recirculating immune cells and the respective tissue microenvironment. The consortium will combine analysis of tissue-derived signatures with “circulating signatures” detectable in liquid biopsies, employing state-of-the-art profiling technologies corresponding to multi-Omics datasets. The project will also bring diagnostics in IMID to a new level by combining disruptive non-invasive liquid-biopsy methodology with novel, validated circulating biomarker assays which are expected to improve diagnosis, inform early in the clinical course on disease severity and progression and enable treatment response monitoring. The identified signature will be validated to monitor state/progression and response to therapy in prospective observational cohorts.
Work in progress
We have been participating in the bi-weekly meeting involving all members of the Consortium. Following the Kick-Off meeting in Newcastle in February 2020, the IDEA-FAST team worked hard to make the vision of the feasibility study come to life. By August 2020 the IDEA-FAST data management platform was launched and ready to receive data collected from the Feasibility Study. In the most recent development IDEA FAST agreed to collaborate withthe Mobilise - D project (IMI Project) to bring synergy and increase the impact and benefi ts of the digital health technologies developed by both projects. The collaboration will exploit common themes and approaches across the projects, to develop digital biomarkers in mobility, sleep and fatigue, including large observational studies involving diverse patient cohorts.
EFCCA also participated in the 4th IDEA-FAST General Assembly held in person in Barcelona on 16th-17th March 2023 with the whole consortium to push forward with the project objectives.
More info: https://idea-fast.eu/
This project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No. 853995. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA. The content provided on this page reflects only the author's view and neither the IMI JU nor the European Commission are responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.
