COMBACTE-CDI’s Final General Assembly
With COMBACTE-CDI coming to an end, the consortium had their final General Assembly meeting on April 14. During the virtual meeting, first results from the project were presented. Thirty-one attendees representing 14 academic and EFPIA partners within the consortium participated.
During the meeting, Dr. Virginie Viprey from the University of Leeds presented results from work packages 1 and 2. Within work package 1 research is done on epidemiology to quantify the burden of Clostridioides difficile Infections (CDI) across the whole healthcare economy. Work Package 2 assesses current practices in Europe and their potential impacts. Dr. Sebastian Wingen-Heimann from the University Hospital of Cologne presented an overview on results on the Health Economic Research aspect of the project. Emily Agnew from Public Health England gave an overview on the work done on Transmission Modelling. In addition, Dr. Ram Venkatachalam presented key achievements of the project management work package.
Important conclusions on the presented research results were:
- Awareness of CDI and guidelines has improved in hospital sites across Europe but there is still disparity between countries and a lack of awareness and testing for CDI in the community.
- Testing for CDI in the community should not be restricted to patients with higher age, but should include all patients with at least one known predisposing factor.
- There is no consistent approach in Europe across the different healthcare economies.
- Compliance of national/international treatment guidelines seems to improve health-economic outcome of CDI patients.
- Undiagnosed “missed” CDI cases should be avoided but the results at hand showed a lower health-economic impact than expected
The results on the research done within these work packages will be published in peer reviewed journals in the coming months.
The data received in COMBACTE-CDI is very useful to the industry. The burden of CDI in Europe is high and understanding the risk factors and level of exposure is important to raise awareness.
Next to the presentations, the consortium had discussions on the COMBACTE-CDI outputs, the way the consortium could maximize the project outputs and on the sustainability of the COMBACTE-CDI network. The meeting was closed by positive feedback from Aaron Dane, from the COMBACTE-CDI Scientific Advisory Board, and Nathalie Seigneuret, Project Officer at IMI (Innovative Medicines Initiatives). Both of them emphasized the importance of result dissemination to the right target groups.
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