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Newsletter Issue n. 4 - March 2020
Welcome back During the first months of 2020, Strituvad had already had several opportunities for its members to meet, to progress their work and to show their latest achievements to the communities of Tuberculosis and In Silico researchers. Some results have been presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Computational Methods for the Immune System Function in San Diego, USA, and at the annual TBVI meeting "Accelerating the TB vaccine pipeline" in Switzerland. Some important preliminary findings have been published on journals, as you can download and read through the links below, and one of our candidate vaccines received the official permission to proceed through phase IIb clinical trials. Last but not least, our project has been involved in the support of In Silico Word, a new community of researchers and expert on in silico methodologies. Discover more in our newsletter!
Scientist and academics working in the STriTuVaD consortium participated to the TBVI meeting “Accelerating the TB vaccine pipeline – towards Horizon Europe” held from 27th to 29th January 2020 in Les Diablerets, Switzerland.
The occasion brought together 120 scientists and policy makers from 70 research institutes, universities, industries, funding agencies, technical agencies from 21 countries, and represented the opportunity to hear from key global stakeholders about their current activities in the field of tuberculosis vaccine R&D.
The three-days meeting was articulated into different sessions, each of them focusing on very specific aspects of the TB vaccine development pipeline.
In the first session “Progress in TB vaccine clinical product development”, our clinical partners Pere-Joan Cardona from Archivel Farma and Rhea Coler from IDRI presented the newest updates respectively on the RUTI and the ID93 vaccines.
“Our latest achievement – explain Olga Rué Clarós, CEO of Archivel Farma – regards the permission to proceed through a phase IIb clinical trials that we received last 20th of January. The clinical trials will take place at the indian partner All India Institute of Medical Sciences facilities in New Delhi and at the Department of Microbiology of the Agartala Government Medical College in Tripura”.
The data obtained from the clinical trials will be then compared with the data predicted with the simulations on virtual patients by the Universal Immune System Simulator (UISS), developed by the group from the University of Catania.
Prof Francesco Pappalardo from Catania talked about this aspect in the session “Innovation in vaccine technologies and modelling”, where he illustrated how the simulation platform will be able to simulate the immune system, the interaction with the TB disease, and the artificial immunity induced by vaccinations and treatments.
“At the moment, we implemented all the features needed to reproduce the immune system response induced by vaccines – explains Prof Pappalardo – and the platform has been now released to our clinical partners for evaluation and feedback gathering.”
The symposium closed with final remarks on the current situation and the future trajectories of TB vaccine research, with a view on the priorities for Horizon Europe programme.
The vaccine developed by Spanish biopharmaceutical company Archivel Farma received the permission to conduct the clinical trial from the Drug Controller General of India.. Keep Reading
In the last months, the final version has been released internally to the consortium in order to be tested by clinical partners; upon their positive feedbacks.. Keep Reading
Paper "Insilicotrials: Verification, validation and uncertainty quantification of predictive models used in the regulatory evaluation of biomedical products" published on Methods
Strituvad consortium built a methodological framework for the credibility assessment of computational models that use mechanistic knowledge of physical and chemical phenomena with available biological and physiological knowledge. Read paper
Papers published on BMC Bioinformatics:
"Parallelisation strategies for agent based simulation of immune systems" This paper explores different approaches to parallelising the key component of biological and immune system models within an ABM model: pairwise interactions. The focus of this paper is on the performance and algorithmic design choices of cell interactions in continuous and discrete space where agents/entities are competing to interact with one another within a parallel environment...
"Predicting the artificial immunity induced by RUTI® vaccine against tuberculosis using universal immune system simulator" application of the Universal Immune System Simulator (UISS) computational modeling infrastructure as a disease model for TB. The model is capable to simulate the main features and dynamics of the immune system activities i.e., the artificial immunity induced by RUTI® vaccine, a polyantigenic liposomal therapeutic vaccine made of fragments of Mycobacterium tuberculosis cells...
Strituvad supports In Silico World Community of Practice
Together with other EU-funded projects, Strituvad is supporting the online Community of practice of academics, industry and regulatory experts and researchers on the in silico field. The community is becoming an integrated teamwork tool for the members of our consortium that are working on the computational model of TB-vaccine interaction and it hosts several other channels for in silico best practices development. (The community is invitation-only; for info contact info@insilico.world)
Related News
Exhaled Mycobacterium tuberculosis output and detection of subclinical disease by face-mask sampling: prospective observational studies - published on The Lancet Infectious Diseases
Novadiscovery raises Series A financing to scale its In Silico clinical trial platform - Debiopharm leads the round with EUR 5 million
Strituvad mentioned at the 3rd International Workshop on Computational Methods for the Immune System Function - workshop held at BIBM2019 in San Diego, USA
Regulatory guidelines for adoption of in silico models in drug development - VPHi leads a working group collaborating with EMA representatives and experts to identify the most appropriate tools for verifying and validating in silico models