Autoimmune, inflammatory and allergic diseases are common chronic diseases that significantly affect the wellbeing of millions of people around the globe and pose a substantial burden to healthcare systems. While different treatments are available, response and disease progression in individual patients remain unpredictable. Currently, still too little is known about the molecular basis underpinning these diseases. In order to be able to better predict treatment response and potentially identify novel biomarkers leading to improved patient management and personalised therapy, a deeper understanding of the cellular mechanisms driving disease development is urgently needed.
In a never-before-seen effort to bring together experts from different medical fields, profiling technologies, systems biology and bioinformatics with specialists from innovative SMEs and leading pharmaceutical companies, 3TR – a public-private partnership project under the IMI umbrella – sets out to fundamentally increase our knowledge of the molecular pathways and mechanisms linked to response and non-response to therapy in seven different immune-mediated, allergic and inflammatory diseases: systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease (incl. ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease), asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Despite their heterogeneity, recent studies have shown that on the molecular level certain patterns are shared by patients across these diseases, thus suggesting they may also share pathways of response to treatment and disease progression.
3TR is funded with more than 80 million euros over the next seven years by IMI2, a joint venture of the European Union and the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries. It involves 69 partner organizations from 15 European Member States, including the “B cell and Autoimmunity” laboratory (UBO /Inserm– members of the Atlanpole Biotherapies cluster) which is one of the three French academic representatives of the consortium and the only one involved in the analysis of the generated data.