Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IHMCSA (International Human Microbiome Coordination and Support Action)
Período documentado: 2021-05-01 hasta 2022-10-31
The International Human Microbiome Coordination and Support Action (IHMCSA ; https://humanmicrobiomeaction.eu/) brings together a strong EU partnership and broad stakeholders group involving all the actors along the innovation chain, including citizens, to i) map the current scientific state-of-play ii) identify the path and actions required to achieve impact iii) build consensus on the priorities and means as part of a roadmap for EU microbiome science and its translation. This will lead to a set of recommendations, validated by the IHMCSA International Strategic Steering Committee, addressed to the European Commission, international research programmes, funding and regulatory agencies and our health system decision makers. To ensure further take-up and sustainability of these project outcomes, IHMCSA will promote via a strong dissemination programme, unified repositories for sharing standards, SOPs and data, as well as initiate the creation of the European Microbiome Centers Consortium, a world microbiome network of excellence. Thanks to IHMCSA, human-associated microbiomes will be recognized for their key role in ensuring the future of mankind.
The IHMCSA partnership also specifically addresses ethical implications of the questions addressed as they concern the perceptions of humans as holobionts (intimate functional association with the microbiomes), and the possibility of using individual microbiome profiles - including self-assessment - towards preventive nutritional recommendations or precision medicine.
The IHMCSA partnership also addresses regulatory aspects as the microbiome field is challenging regulatory agencies by the insertion of novel live biological ‘actives’ (full human intestinal ecosystems or fractions therefrom) in the realm of Therapeutics. The rules to maintain a strong European potential to contribute to innovation being at stake, the IHMCSA partnership contributes to consultations and debates, as well as interactions with the SOHO group to propose expert vision on the microbiome-related topics/issues.
The IHMCSA partnership is already involved in communicating its processes and its contribution to knowledge and consensus building on the microbiome field.
Finally, the IHMCSA partnership is preparing the inception of the European Microbiome Centers Consortium as a means to structure the field and to ensure sustainability of its actions including implementations of recommendations / strategic research and innovation agenda derived from international consensus
- Proposed concrete methods, standards, procedures and in vivo models in order to improve harmonisation and increase comparability of metagenomics, metabolomics and human microbiome data from past, current and future projects in Europe and beyond.
- Means to provide definitive references of healthy human metagenomes. These should apply across various populations and help end-users and citizens to see which microbiome is healthy. It will also provide a guide for health professionals to evaluate preventive or therapeutic approaches to protect or restore the microbiota-host symbiosis.
- Means to provide more meaningful results through collaborative synergistic collection of microbiome data from different sources.
- Means to improve coherence and reduce overlap between national, EU and other funding in the area of human microbiome research, thus ensuring an efficient use of the available human and financial resources.
- Knowledge exchange and enhanced engagement of citizens, scientists and political stakeholders for priority health risks, in order to speed up the delivery of validated results.
- Means to promote an integration of metagenomics and human microbiome references into other multilateral co-operation areas or personalised medicine approaches.