CA21164 - Towards an improvement in diagnostics and treatment strategies for TB control (ADVANCE-TB)

Tuberculosis (TB) was the leading cause of mortality from an infectious disease globally before Coronavirus Disease 19. The unprecedented pandemic is a major setback for TB programmes and its impact has been tremendous in terms of disruption of timely diagnostic and intervention services, drop in notification numbers, treatment interruptions, inadequate patient’s treatment follow-up and increase in mortality. In order to mitigate this impact more efforts and resources have to be allocated. Currently, no COST Action exists to address the complexity of TB management, offering an advantage to this proposal. The ADVANCE-TB is a research network that offers opportunities for collaboration between clinicians, academic researchers from interdisciplinary backgrounds, industry and non-governmental organizations to achieve breakthroughs difficult to obtain by individual partners, allowing a better understanding of the underlying host-pathogen mechanisms, enabling the transfer of basic science into innovative applications and allowing product development and clinical validation. The Action focuses on 1).developing best clinical practices and experimental standardization protocols, including harmonized biobanking procedures; 2).stimulating the development and optimization of products for diagnostic and therapy/monitoring; 3).disseminate knowledge and allow capacity-building through different types of workshops, training schools and short-term scientific missions, prioritizing early career investigators. The tasks are distributed in 4 working groups (WG). Briefly, WG1 will be focused on the characterization of patient’s cohorts, WG2 will be devoted to the development and evaluation of novel diagnostic methods, WG3 will be centred on the design of novel therapeutical strategies and WG4 will be responsible for dissemination and communication activities.