COMBACTE-CDI Close-Out Meeting
On Friday November 12th, the COMBACTE-CDI consortium, together with IMI and EFPIA partners, held the close-out meeting of COMBACTE’s fourth project. The aim of the meeting was to share key achievements from the project and discuss next steps with the consortium and the IMI Programme Office.
A total of 31 attendees participated in the virtual close-out meeting. From the COMBACTE-CDI consortium, participants attended from both the EFPIA partners (BioMerieux, Sanofi Pasteur, Pfizer and GSK) and the academic partners (National Laboratory for Health, Environment and Food NLZOH (Slovenia), University Medical Center Utrecht, University of Leeds, Leiden University Medical Center, University Hospital of Cologne and the National Institute for Infectious Diseases Italy). External participants joined from EFPIA, ECDC and IMI.
During the meeting the consortium presented how it reached its objectives, highlighted tangible results and put the achievements of the project into context. The team also looked at the contribution of the project to IMI’s overall objectives and the uptake of all other stakeholders.
The presentation started with a short introduction on Clostridioides Difficile Infections (CDI), the objectives for the consortium and the project methodology. The following key achievements were presented by the academic partners:
- The identification of the burden of CDI across the European healthcare economies
- The dynamic transmission model which demonstrates that true incidence of colonized and infected cases in the hospital setting in different European countries can be predicted
- The healthcare costs of CDI diagnostic and treatment measures vary markedly
- The costs and overall stay of a patient with a recurrence of CDI is much higher
- For the first time, the epidemiology of CDI was uniquely identified per different setting (humans (community and hospital), animals and food)
- The creation of a well characterized strain collection including whole genome sequencing
- The understanding of the gaps in current guidance and compliance for diagnosis and clinical management of CDI
After the presentation of key achievements, the impact of scientific and online outputs was presented, later followed by the impact of the project on patients, pharma, diagnostics companies, SME’s, researchers and other stakeholders. The consortium ended with sharing best practices and lessons learned.
COMBACTE-CDI ended
The 30th of April officially marks the end of COMBACTE-CDI. This was COMBACTE’s 4th project focusing on research of Clostridioides difficile infections. The project started in November 2017 and yielded important results. It developed a detailed understanding of the epidemiology and clinical impact of CDI across the whole healthcare economy in Europe. Most of the preliminary results can be seen in the infographic or abstracts for ECCMID.
To date, one COMBACTE-CDI paper has been published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, titled“Haem is crucial for medium-dependent metronidazole resistance in clinical isolates of Clostridioides difficile“.
Another pre-print paper on “Key Differences in Diagnosis and Patient Populations between Community and In-Patient Clostridioides Difficile Infections (CDI): Results from Combatting Bacterial Resistance in Europe CDI” can be found here.
Further results of the research done within the COMBACTE-CDI work packages will be published in peer reviewed journals soon.
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