Project: Tailored Immunotherapy for Paediatric SIRS (severe inflammatory response syndrome)

Acronym	TIPS (Reference Number: ERAPERMED2020-073)
Project Topic	The systemic inflammatory response syndrome (SIRS) is a life-threatening condition characterized by a mortality rate of 7-25 percent depending on timely recognition of the underlying disease. At present we lack targeted therapy for SIRS not only because triggers are often unknown, but also because host responses to triggers may vary. For the majority of patients, acute management is based on nonspecific symptoms and routine laboratory parameters without distinct stratification. In the absence of readily available diagnostic tools to guide targeted treatment for paediatric SIRS patients, we have set ourselves the goal of generating personalised immunoprofiles and identifying diagnostic patterns to develop patient-tailored therapies and improve outcome. TIPS will be conducted as a multicentre study involving four European countries. Comprehensive patient-specific data will be collected in order to generate personalised profiles in patients with well-defined SIRS (group 1: autoinflammation, group 2: sepsis) versus SIRS of undefined cause (group 3). Characterization will include immune profiling, RNA-expression analysis, proteomics, genomics and microbiome, completed by mass-spectrometry-based lipidomics. A novel bioinformatics pipeline for integrative analysis will serve to create a prediction model (group 1 vs. 2), which will be applied to group 3. In a second step, groups will be assessed by logistic regression for clinical outcome. Generating multiOMICs data in paediatric patients raises ethical and legal concerns. We will study children as vulnerable subjects of research in general, appraise risk-benefit for study participants, debate the responsible use of personal information and tackle challenges posed by different national regulatory frameworks. With TIPS, we will be able to better classify children with SIRS – opening up a far-reaching perspective for personalised therapy with improved patient outcome and reduction in socio-economic burden.
Network	ERA PerMed
Call	3rd Joint Transnational Call for Proposals (2020)

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
1	Medical Faculty “Carl Gustav Carus”, Technische Universitaet Dresden	Coordinator	Germany
2	University of Helsinki	Partner	Finland
3	University of Luxembourg	Partner	Luxembourg
4	Ulm University	Partner	Germany
5	Istanbul University-Cerrahpasa	Partner	Türkiye