On 10th December 2018, Luxembourg’s researchers and clinicians gathered at the 8th edition of the annual retreat of the Personalised Medicine Consortium (PMC). The event was an opportunity to exchange knowledge, provide updates on the progress of ongoing projects in personalised medicine and announce the three awardees of the 2018 PMC Pump Prime Fund.

The successful development of new therapies in the context of personalised medicine relies on the tight interaction between Luxembourg’s biomedical research sector and the clinical practice. To promote a constructive dialogue between researchers and clinicians, the Personalised Medicine Consortium (PMC) was created back in 2010 with the aim of fostering new research collaborations addressing unmet clinical needs in the field of personalised medicine.

Every year, clinicians and researchers from LIH, IBBL - Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg, the Laboratoire National de Santé (LNS), the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) and the Life Sciences Research Unit (LSRU) of the University of Luxembourg gather for a one-day conference to update each other on the progress of their application-targeted research projects and to discuss potential new collaborations.

This year, the PMC retreat was hosted by the LCSB and held at the Maison du Savoir on the Belval Campus in Esch-sur-Alzette. Presentations fell under three focus areas, namely genotypic variation and epigenetics, microbiome and the environment and inflammation. After the interventions, the three awardees of the 2018 edition of the Pump Prime Fund and their respective projects selected for funding were announced:

• Dr Elisabeth Letellier (LSRU): Integrated multi-omics profiling of primary tumours and metastases from colorectal cancer patients: towards tailor-made therapies (MetPC);

• Dr Feng He (LIH): Comprehensive peripheral immune status assessment in Parkinson’s disease patients (CoPImmunoPD);

• Dr Joël Mossong (LNS): Metagenomics for determining the infectious aetiology of paediatric and adult meningo-encephalitis: a pilot study.

The project of Dr Feng He, Principal Investigator heading the “Immune Systems Biology” research group at LIH’s Department of Infection and Immunity, involves also Prof Markus Ollert (Director of the Department of Infection and Immunity) and collaboration partners at the LCSB (Prof Rejko Krueger and Dr Patrick May) and IBBL (Dr Fay Betsou).