COMBACTE Projects End: A View from IMI’s Executive Director

What do you feel about the outputs of COMBACTE-CDI?

“C. difficile infection (CDI) remains a very important disease. There are 200,000 cases in Europe every year and a vulnerable population is affected by it, yet the general understanding of CDI was not very well articulated before. For this reason, the epidemiology and clinical impact studies of COMBACTE-CDI have been very important.

The other significant aspect of COMBACTE-CDI has been the role of diagnostics. This was indeed the first time that a diagnostic company joined an IMI project. You can see the parallels of the growing interest in diagnostics in antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in general. If you want to reduce the amount of antibiotics being prescribed, then you need to have a more targeted approach. Which means that more access to and availability of rapid diagnostics for AMR is needed. That paved the way for another very important project in the IMI portfolio, VALUE-Dx, which focuses on the value of diagnostics in AMR. Often you see these flows of one thing leading to another. These things are very strongly linked to each other and overlap.

So in summary, COMBACTE-CDI is a very important program and its outputs should help to raise awareness about how challenging this diseases is, how important its surveillance is, and that we should be doing more about it”.

In your opinion, what are COMBACTE-MAGNET’s most significant results?

“COMBACTE-MAGNET has been focusing on gram-negative bacteria and has set up a very sophisticated pan-European epidemiology network which has been a fantastic surveillance tool.

Through EPI-Net, the project also developed the famous AMR travel Tool, a very user friendly tool that is useful for both professionals and people who are planning to travel to understand what kind of environment they’re going to in various countries.

Very importantly COMBACTE-MAGNET was one of the projects that actually used the COMBACTE network for clinical developments and they have a big impact on looking at different clinical trial designs. They were also joined by collaborations from the US, such as the ARLG. It’s important to be connected to the rest of the world whether that’s through ARLG or BARDA. It’s great that this kind of outreach can be done and global partners can be brought in to deal with these global issues”.

How important is project sustainability for the IMI office?

“One of our main challenges for every IMI project is this famous word: sustainability. I always see IMI as a catalyst funder. But every project has a beginning and an end. We have a huge vested interest in that by the time a project ends, it has found a new business model, a new foundation, or a new structure in order to become sustainable. In COMBACTE’s case, this means sustaining the valuable networks it has established.

The role of the private sector is very important here. The private sector is part of that sustainability package and they need to use the network. Since they have been part of creating it and their assets have been used to validate the network, then we’re in a great position for that to continue through ECRAID.

That is the double benefit of bringing in other infrastructures that have been important in Europe, like PREPARE and ECRIN, where this collective play is the way to go and can pave the way for these sustainability models of the future”.

How do you see the COMBACTE projects’ contribution to the fight against AMR?

“We’ve made a lot of progress in AMR through IMI. But in the end we are just one small organization, so even though we’ve achieved a lot – thanks in large part to the COMBACTE projects but also the other N4BB projects and hopefully soon through the AMR Accelerator – there’s still a huge amount of work to do”.