Project Launch: New EU Project SYSCID Combats Chronic Inflammatory Disease

The international consortium of the new European research project SYSCID (“A systems medicine approach to chronic inflammatory disease“) aims to develop a personalised medicine approach for inflammatory bowel disease, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus. The project coordinated by Kiel University in Germany (CAU) receives a total funding of 14.4 million Euros for a period of five years. Academic and industry partners from nine different countries join forces to achieve the ambitious goals of the project which has started at the beginning of 2017.

With a lifetime prevalence of over ten percent in the EU, chronic inflammatory disease (CID) poses a major health care burden to modern society. “Our vision is to develop a prediction framework for disease outcome and choice of treatment strategies. With many new targeted therapies coming to the market, we need the right therapy at the right time,” said Dr Philip Rosenstiel from the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology at Kiel University and scientific coordinator of the SYSCID consortium. “Our approach combines several biomarker layers from the epigenome to the microbiome, but also aims to investigate more sophisticated tools, such as single cell analysis.”

The new epigenetic markers could be more significant than inflammation markers in the blood which have been used so far. As these ‘traditional’ markers also increase in patients with a common cold or elevated temperature, they cannot always be allocated clearly.

SYSCID will use dense clinical sampling and molecular phenotyping to analyse longitudinal patient cohorts and obtain a deeper understanding of the immunological network changes associated with response and non-response to current treatment regimes. Unlike current therapeutic interventions which mainly alleviate the symptoms, SYSCID aims to develop a therapeutic strategy that will eventually offer a first causal therapy. The consortium targets new therapy approaches by ‘reprogramming’ disease through epigenome editing. “Assuming that the development and course of a disease are related to long-term epigenetic alterations, it makes sense to target the very root of the disease,” Rosenstiel said.

SYSCID will build on previous and ongoing research activities by partners and international initiatives such as the International Human Epigenome Consortium (IHEC) with the aim of exploiting already collected and established patient data and enabling their utilisation for the development of new clinical applications. Moreover, the project will create training opportunities and career perspectives for young European scientists with its findings serving as a blueprint for future development of precision medicine in other fields.

As part of the multinational SYSCID consortium, Eurice supports the overall project management and coordinates the exploitation and communication activities. These will include strategic development, innovation monitoring and implementation of various communication actions such as the setup and maintenance of the project website and the design of dissemination materials.

Project acronym: SYSCID
Start date: 01 January 2017
Duration: 63 months
Budget: € 14.4 Mio
Coordination: Kiel University, Germany

SYSCID Partners at a glance

Belgium

VIB University of Liege

Croatia

* Genos

Denmark

* University of Southern Denmark

Germany

Kiel University Comma Soft AG European Research and Project Office GmbH Saarland University * University of Bonn

Greece

* Biomedical Research Foundation of the Academy of Athens

Italy

* Humanitas University

Luxemburg

* University of Luxemburg

Switzerland

* University of Geneva

UK

King´s College London University of Cambridge