PerMIT

PerMIT is supported by the ERAPerMed initative for joint transnational projects on Personalized Medicine  – smart combination of pre-clinical and clinical research with data and ICT solutions. To achieve its objective, the project builds on a transnational interdisciplinary team of clinicians, experimentalists, bioinformaticians and computational modellers. Partners are supported by their respective national funding agency including the Swedish Research Council, Innovationsfonden (Denmark), the Research Council of Norway, ZonMw (The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development) (The Netherlands) and X (Germany).

The PerMIT-project focuses on life-threatening infectious diseases, including the destructive necrotizing soft tissue infections (NSTI) and the large group of sepsis patients. The severity of these infections is dictated by the individual’s response to the pathogen and greatly depends on subject-specific host-pathogen interactions. For this reason, personalized therapeutic strategies targeting both the pathogen and host response are needed. To achieve this, PERMIT builds on the knowledge and resources created in the EU FP7-project INFECT including the world’s largest multicenter, prospectively enrolled patient cohort on NSTI, a biobank, multi-omics data, strategic data stewardship and pathophysiologic models. Based on INFECT data, one focus area is immunometabolism and its contribution to disease. PERMIT will move towards preclinical validation of disease signatures, underlying mechanisms and biomarkers with the aim of translating these findings into improved or novel diagnostics, and to demonstrate the clinical feasibility and potential benefit of a personalized medicine approach to the treatment. The project will focus on delineating mechanisms at the individual level in NSTI patients and will extend the findings into the larger field of sepsis.