SMA-TB

A novel Stratified Medicine Algorithm to predict treatment responses to host-directed therapy in TB

EU Horizon 2020 project: CORDIS (SMA-TB)

Tuberculosis (TB) is a chronic, life-threatening infectious disease which poses a tremendous challenge for physicians, researchers, and health systems. Treatment is long, based only on the drug susceptibility of the responsible infective strain, and very costly in drug-resistant cases (MDR-TB). The European Region still has the highest prevalence of MDR-TB in the world. Host-Directed Therapies (HDT) have been recently proposed to shorten treatment length and improve patients' outcomes while not increasing the risk of generating drug resistance. As hyperinflammation is responsible for the lung damage associated with patients' worse outcomes and sequelae, one of the approaches is to add an HDT with anti-inflammatory effect to the current drug regimen to cure patients faster while having less permanent lung damage.

SMA-TB objectives

• To generate a medical algorithm to stratify patients using network-based mathematical modelling for predicting the course of the disease and its response to the intervention, to be applied during clinical management to improve and personalize TB.
• To identify and clinically validate host and pathogen biomarkers for further selection according to their relevance in terms of their ability to predict TB course and outcomes and response to treatment.
• To evaluate in a clinical trial the potential impact of aspirin (an anti-inflammatory HDT) as adjunct to standard therapy for drug sensitive (DS-) and MDR-TB, potentially reducing tissue damage, decreasing the length of treatment and the risk of bad outcomes.

Partner institutions

The consortium includes: Fundació Institut d'Investigació en Ciències de la Salut Germans Trias i Pujol (Spain), Wits Health Consortium (South Africa), National Center for Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases (Georgia), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France), Academisch Ziekenhuis Leiden (Netherlands), Oslo Universitetssykehus (Norway), Anaxomics Biotech S.L. (Spain), TES2A Europe (Spain), and Lionex GmbH (Germany).

Lionex role: Lionex has produced large quantities of endotoxin-free antigens of M. tuberculosis and has developed a novel test for diagnosing Latent TB Infection (LTBI)/TB.