Objectives

To achieve the envisaged advances in the management and treatment of ulcerative colitis and atopic dermatitis, the following objectives have been defined:

  1. To strengthen the knowledge base and support advancements in the field of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases
  2. To improve the competitiveness of European industry and support the development and evaluation of biomarkers that could be used in large clinical trials longitudinally
  3. To conduct a comprehensive molecular characterisation of intestinal/dermal microenvironment and immune cell profiles providing a data foundation for advanced bioinformatics as well as statistical and model-based analyses
  4. To confirm the identified signatures in tissue and blood samples from a large retrospective and longitudinal cohort and in a non-interventional prospective clinical study
  5. To evaluate evolving technologies such as dermal open-flow microperfusion and ultrasound-enabled gut liquid biopsy as non-invasive approaches for the identification of new microenvironmental biomarkers suitable to reflect clinically relevant tissue-based signatures of disease progression and/or response to treatment
  6. To establish an integrated large-scale platform for data storage and computing to collect, curate, harmonise and standardise existing and newly generated data in a secure data and analysis platform on secured servers