Information about Project 15: Supportive Care

Created by: Hellenbrecht (ELIC) , generated 2006/02/14, last changed: 2006/05/10

Objectives

Development of European Guidelines for the Prophylaxis and Treatment of Infections in Patients with Leukemia (including conventional chemotherapy, autologous and allogeneic stem cell transplantation).
Evaluation and standardization of techniques to assess the risk for specific infections following antileukemic therapy.
Evaluation and standardization of screening for invasive fungal infection (IFI) and monitoring of antifungal therapy.
Creating a European Platform to initiate multicenter studies evaluating new antimicrobial agents in prophylaxis and treatment of infections in patients with leukemia.

Currently national guidelines for the prophylaxis and treatment of infections in patients with leukemia are being or are already established. One of the goals of this WP is to standardize and optimize these guidelines at a European level.
New treatment strategies based on in-house diagnostic assays are increasingly being developed. Due to the lack of standardization these strategies are difficult to compare and to assess. Thus one major goal of this work-package will be to evaluate and compare various assays to determine pathogen-specific immune responses as well as new techniques to diagnose invasive fungal infection at an early state. Consequently standardization of these screening procedures will be aimed for at a European level.
In addition, a European platform will be established aiming for initiating and performing large multicenter studies in infection management and prophylaxis of patients with leukemia at an European level.
Another aim is to establish a collection of DNA/Serum samples from European leukemia patients with/without documented infection to facilitate studies of markers determining vulnerability to infections.