PerAID

Personalized Medicine in Acute Infectious Diseases (PerAID)

The PerAID project proposes to boost personalized medicine (PM) in severe infectious diseases, specifically focusing on the life-threatening necrotizing soft tissue infections (NSTI) as well as the large heterogeneous group of sepsis patients. Personalized medicine is a neglected, albeit much desired, development in the field of acute infectious diseases. The patient population is highly heterogeneous with different pathogens, pathogenic mechanisms, as well as varying predisposing host factors, and importantly, a dysregulated host response to infection is directly linked to severity and outcome of severe infections such as sepsis and NSTI. Hence, tailored immunotherapy in stratified patients holds great potential.

PerAID builds on the results, advances and resources created in the EU FP7-project INFECT, including the world’s largest patient cohort on NSTI (Scandinavian patients enrolled by PerAIDs partners from Denmark, Norway and Sweden), biobank, multi-omics data, and pathophysiologic models. Using these resources and an extended Nordic consortium including also the Norwegian sepsis center (www.sepsis.no) enables PerAID to advance to the next phase of implementing PM in these life-threatening infections. A key activity of PerAID is to create a Nordic platform for PM in infectious diseases to enable the establishment of harmonized, comprehensive and accessible databases for clinical and omics data, as well as biobanks for patients with NSTI and sepsis, and an interdisciplinary knowledge centre embedded in a Responsible Research & Innovation (RRI) framework. This platform will provide a forum for interdisciplinary research activities and will promote quality controlled, standardized, and accessible patient cohorts, registries, biobanks and omics data. This will greatly enable high quality PM activities in the field of infectious diseases, which will benefit not only researchers and clinicians, but also other stakeholders, i.e. industry, patients and civil society, as well as key actors on the international arena including European organisations and WHO. In PerAID we seek to identify disease signatures and biomarkers of diagnostic or prognostic value, as well as identify tailored therapeutic strategies in specific patient groups.