ImmUniverse

Project information

Full title: Better control and treatment of immune-mediated diseases by exploring the universe of microenvironment imposed tissue signatures and their correlates in liquid biopsies (ImmUniverse)

Duration: 78 months (1 January 2020 – 30 June 2026)

Status: Completed

Funding programme: H2020-JTI-IMI2-2018-15-two-stage, Grant agreement no. 853995

What is the project about?

Immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs) vary enormously from person to person, both in how the disease progresses and in how well patients respond to targeted treatments. Health professionals currently have no reliable way to predict these differences in advance.

To move toward precision medicine for IMIDs, researchers first need to systematically understand why this diversity happens, and they need biomarkers that can reliably predict, over time, whether a patient’s disease will be controlled and how they will respond to therapy.

The ImmUniverse project was created to address exactly this gap. It brings together a European consortium of researchers from different disciplines, working together to understand how the crosstalk between the tissue microenvironment and immune cells drives disease progression and treatment response. The project focuses on two specific IMIDs: ulcerative colitis and atopic dermatitis.

What are the expected outcomes?

The project aims to bring diagnostics in IMIDs 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 on disease severity and progression at an early stage of treatment and enable adequate monitoring of treatment response. The identified signature will be validated to monitor state, progression and response to therapy in prospective observational studies.

What is EPFs’ role?

EPF’s role mainly focuses on communication and dissemination. EPF will work on a dissemination product to engage and inform relevant patient communities about the project results, especially why and how they matter in terms of patients’ diagnosis and treatment for ulcerative colitis/inflammatory bowel disease and atopic dermatitis.

The consortium

IMMUniverse brings together a multi-disciplinary consortium of about 30 partners from across Europe, including universities, R&D institutions, hospitals, patient organisations, industry, and data and knowledge management companies:

1. Humanitas University
2. AIT Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH
3. Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Italian NIH)
4. Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
5. University of Cambridge
6. Amsterdam UMC - Academic Medical Centre Amsterdam
7. Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (Flemish Institute for Biotechnology)
8. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
9. Ludwig-Maximilian University
10. Aarhus University
11. Aarhus University Hospital
12. University of Luxembourg
13. Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH
14. Radboud University Medical Center, Radboudumc
15. Centre Hospitalier Régional Universitaire Nancy
16. Information Technology for Translational Medicine S.A.
17. European Patients' Forum
18. European Federation of Allergy and Airways Diseases Patients’ Associations
19. European Federation of Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis Associations
20. European Research and Project Office GmbH
21. Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies
22. GlaxoSmithKline Research and Development Ltd.
23. Sanofi-Aventis Deutschland GmbH
24. Eli Lilly and Company Limited
25. Novartis Pharma AG
26. Pfizer Ltd
27. Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele
28. University of Ulm
29. Erasmus MC University Medical Center Rotterdam