Welcome on board

We are proud to present the first newsletter of the STriTuVaD project that will provide you with information about the progress, most recent achievements and forthcoming activities related to the development of in silico trials to test the efficacy of new therapies for the treatment of Tuberculosis.

In this issue:

• Full Article: World TB day 24 March 2019

• STRITUVAD in a nutshell

• EU-India cooperation on health challenge posed by Tuberculosis in India

• Related News

• Upcoming Events

World TB day - 24 March 2019

On the occasion of World Tuberculosis Day on March 24, the World Health Organization (WHO) reminds the commitment made with the 'End TB Strategy': to reduce TB incidence by 80%, TB deaths by 90% and to eliminate catastrophic costs that burdens TB-affected families, by 2030.

The call is on country leaders, stakeholders and partners to join the strategy to increase the number of people reported as diagnosed and treated, and to reach at least 30 million people with TB preventive services between 2018 and 2022.

This is why the challenge and target set by the STriTuVaD consortium is very relevant to address on the World TB Day 2019’s theme 'It’s time'; it’s time to improve access to treatment. For this, there is an urgent toned to scale up access to prevention and treatment, especially in those countries, like India, where tuberculosis is not just a health issue, but a health burden for the people and the States:

“The social and economic impacts are devastating, including poverty, stigma and discrimination - says Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General – we need to accelerate our efforts to make TB history". Joining forces worldwide to improve the testing of new drugs, would be a huge step in that direction.

In particular, the STriTuVaD project, funded by the European Commission under its framework programme 'Horizon 2020' and consisting of European and international partners, has the ambitious goal of bringing radically innovative in silico methods in the evaluation process of new vaccines: this may have a dramatic impact in terms of a faster and cost-effective development of new therapies to fight this deadly disease.

In almost any industrial sector where there are safety concerns, before a product is tested in the field, it is analysed with dozens of computer simulations, aimed at highlighting if that product will work as expected under a variety of conditions. The only exception is the medical field, where until recently the only way to assess the safety and the efficacy of new therapies was to test them on animals or on humans in clinical trials.

Beside the ethical implications of such experimentation, this trial and error approach based on very expensive clinical trials is a major factor in the high cost of new drugs. The costs are becoming so high that people in lower income countries can rarely afford them, and in countries where universal healthcare is provided the drugs expenditure is becoming so high that the free access to healthcare is being questioned. In Silico Trials, or the possibility to test first in a computer simulation any new drug, could dramatically reduce such costs, opening the door to more effective but also more affordable TB therapies. We also expect In Silico Trials to shorten considerably the time required for a new drug to reach the market.

Before we adopt these innovative in silico methods, we need to demonstrate convincingly that their predictions are accurate and reliable. This is why it is crucial that all the stakeholders involved in TB vaccine development, consider pro-actively the challenge posed by one of the partners in the STriTuVaD project, Prof Viceconti from University of Bologna, in a recent declaration to the press: “We invite all related institutions and organizations to set a long-term goal to achieve similar safety studies with 50% less animals used and 50% less costs within a 10 year period" to which he added that this was a conservative objective if In Silico Trials approaches are adopted”.

STRITUVAD in a nutshell

The project aims at developing new technologies that makes possible to test the efficacy of new therapies at least partly in a computer simulation, rather than through expensive pre-clinical studies on animals, or clinical studies on patients. Read more...

EU-India cooperation on health challenge posed by Tuberculosis in India

The first meeting of the consortium of European, American and Indian scientists took place in New Delhi in January 2019. Keep Reading...

Related News

• FDA Commissioner Gottlieb resigns - VPH insitute President, Prof Marco Viceconti, shares his view on the recent resignation of the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, a supporter of in silico medicine.

• Will in silico clinical trials revolutionize drug development? - Dr Mesko explains how clinical trial can be carried out in less time, with less money and still amazing results.

• India now a key player in neglected disease treatment - Opinion of Soumya Swaminathan, deputy director-general of programmes for the World Health Organization.

• In silico trials: concepts and early adoptions - Article by Pappalardo, Russo, Tshinanu and Viceconti published on Briefings in Bioinformatics.

• Digital design in life sciences - The role of in silico medicine in the challenge to reduce device and treatments development timelines and costs.

• Tuberculosis may be eradicated by 2045 with better research funding - A team of experts from 13 nations share their opinion in The Lancet report.

Upcoming events

• "Towards in silico-guided clinical trials in cancer" workshop, 15-16 May, 2019 in Oslo
  

• CompBioMed Conference, 25-27 Sept, 2019 will host a symposium on in silico trials
  

• European Society of Biomechanics ESB-ITA2019 IX Annual Meeting will be held in Bologna on the 30 Sept - 01 Oct, 2019