IMMEDIATE Progress Meeting successfully held in Milan
The IMMEDIATE project, an innovative collaboration exploring the complex relationships between diet, the microbiome, metabolites, and the immune system, successfully held its first progress meeting on 21 and 22 March 2024. The meeting took place in Milan and hosted by ZADIG. More than 30 participants from 13 project partners attended in person and online.
The meeting started with a warm welcome by the project coordinators, Prof Dr Friedemann Paul and Dr Chotima Böttcher from Charite - Universitätsmedizin Berlin and continued with presentations by representatives from each work package to address current progress and challenges. Lively debates and thought-provoking questions helped the partners to determine the necessary next steps. The productive first day ended with a delicious Italian dinner and an informal gathering of the partners.
The second and final day of the progress meeting started with a presentation from our sister project, Initialise, where the work package leader, Alex Dickens from the University of Turku, gave an update on the status of their work. The meeting then continued with four brainstorming sessions, facilitated by our subject matter experts, to further deepen the conversation and explore creative ways to achieve the project goals.
Dr Sofia Kirke Forslund-Startceva from Max Delbrück Center facilitated a discussion on making our own solution for a data management platform and explored an effective and ethical way to harmonize all the data. Prof Dr Karolina Skonieczna-Żydecka from the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin reported on the impressive number of 134 participants recruited for the IMMEDIATE proof-of-concept study and concluded with open questions that needed to be clarified.
Besides the proof-of-concept study mentioned above, one of the biggest components of the project is the IMMEDI app developed by ZADIG. Their brainstorming session considered what enhancements could be made to the existing application used by the proof-of-concept study participants and what options are available for other apps we are developing for the general population. In order to continue the multiple omics data integration, Prof Marc-Emmanuel Dumas from the Imperial College London led a brainstorming session on the Multi-Omics Platform for Precision Immunology.
Project coordinators concluded the meeting by congratulating the consortium on the hard work made so far and the next steps needed for project success. The next IMMEDIATE progress meeting will be held in Poland in 2025 and hosted by Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin.
