IMMEDIATE – ENDOTARGET’s sister project

IMMEDIATE stands for “Imminent Disease Prediction and Prevention at the Environment Host Interface”. Led by ECRC (a cooperation between Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the MDC). The IMMEDIATE project aims to develop personalised prediction and prevention strategies for non-communicable diseases caused by chronic inflammations. Bringing together 12 partner institutions from Europe, the UK, and Israel, the project is funded by the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation “Horizon Europe” with a total budget of 6.2 M EUR.
An unhealthy lifestyle, including a pro-inflammatory “Western diet,” physical inactivity, work-related stress, and other environmental factors have a major impact on our health. Going by the name of ‘exposome’, they are proven to largely drive chronic inflammation, resulting finally in organ dysfunction and clinical manifestations such as obesity, chronic kidney disease, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and brain damage.
To prevent non-communicable diseases, it is essential to identify individual biomarkers of risk and resilience against chronic inflammations as early as in the pre-symptomatic stage. Since the gut controls the regulation of inflammatory responses and dietary habits have emerged as the most relevant factor for health-to-disease transitions, the interface of diet, microbiota, and host is crucial to unravelling key factors for chronic inflammation. Yet, this so-called “diet-microbiome-metabolite-immune axis” still widely constitutes a “blind range of imminent disease.”
Utilizing artificial intelligence algorithms, the IMMEDIATE consortium will determine the individual impact of dietary habits on the microbiome, the metabolome, and the immune system, as well as further on chronic-inflammation-driven changes in health status. The combined effects of lifestyle, nutrition, occupation, social, psychosocial, and genetic factors on health-to-disease transitions can only be studied effectively in trials conducted on large, statistically representative cohorts and over a sufficiently long period of time. IMMEDIATE will therefore apply multi-omics technologies in a combination with machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to three existing large prospective studies: 10k (Israel), NAKO, and KTX360°C (Germany). The AI-based analysis of these cohorts will provide significantly large datasets regarding populations with diverse ancestries that live in different geographic regions, and have different lifestyle habits (e.g., diet, smoking, and alcohol consumption), thereby enabling the definition of risk and resilience profiles for chronic inflammation.
In order to test the beneficial, anti-inflammatory effect of a microbial intervention, IMMEDIATE will conduct a proof-of-concept human study on a population of healthcare professionals (e.g., physicians, nurses, and paramedics) who are exposed to high and regular levels of stress. The goal is to demonstrate the improvement of health outcomes on the risk profiles for chronic inflammation identified in the prospective studies. Moreover, the study will enable the optimisation of mobile apps designed by the IMMEDIATE consortium to offer personalised lifestyle monitoring and recommendations and to help citizens manage their own health proactively.

Website: https://www.immediate-project.eu/
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/immediate-eu-project/
X: https://twitter.com/ImmediateEu