Mycobacterium abscessus (Mabs) is an emerging opportunistic pathogen responsible for lung infections particularly in cystic fibrosis patients. These infections are challenging worldwide due to their increasing incidence, their extreme resistance to available antimicrobial agents.
The lack of new efficient antibiotics forces researchers and clinicians to optimize treatments with existing antibiotics, generally by combining several molecules together. In order to do so, using innovative approaches like organoids to study antibiotic efficacy are needed. Human lung organoid is a 3D cell clusters organized into organ-like constituting unprecedented innovative tools to evaluate antibiotic efficacy against Mabs by taking into account the CF lung environment allowing study and then limiting the use of animals. This approach coupled to mathematical simulations to optimize the concentration of antibiotic to use and to the understanding of Mabs resistance development during treatment will also bring new information to know whether to associate the different antibiotics together.
The objective of the ACOMa project is to improve the treatment of patient by optimizing antibiotic combinations by implementing innovative approaches coupling the use of lung organoid with semi-mechanistic PK/PD models.
Project partners
- Julien Buyck, INSERM U1070 “Pharmacology of Antimicrobial Agents and antibioResistance”, France (Coordinator)
- Peter Sander, Universität Zürich, Switzerland
- Céline Cougoule, Institute of Pharmacology and Structural Biology, France
- Nicola Ivan Lore, Ospedale San Raffaele, Italy
- Lucas Boeck, Basel university, Switzerland
