Chronic aortic aneurysms are permanent and localized dilations of the aorta that remain asymptomatic for long periods of time but continue to increase in diameter before they eventually rupture. Left untreated, the patients’ prognosis is dismal, since the internal bleeding of the rupture brings about sudden death. Although successful treatment cures the disease, the risky procedures can result in paraplegia from spinal cord ischaemia or even death, particularly for aneurysms extending from the thoracic to the abdominal aorta and thus involving many segmental arteries to the spinal cord, i.e. thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms of Crawford type II. Although various strategies have achieved a remarkable decrease in the incidence of paraplegia, it is still no less than 10 to 20%. However, it has been found that the deliberate occlusion of the segmental arteries to the paraspinous collateral network finally supplying the spinal cord does not increase rates of permanent paraplegia. A therapeutic option, ‘minimally invasive segmental artery coil embolization’ has been devised which proceeds in a ‘staged’ way to occlude groups of arteries under highly controlled conditions after which time must be allowed for arteriogenesis to build a robust collateral blood supply. PAPA-ARTiS is a phase II trial to demonstrate that a staged treatment approach can reduce paraplegia and mortality dramatically. It can be expected to have both a dramatic impact on the individual patient's quality of life if saved from a wheelchair, and also upon financial systems through savings in; 1) lower costs in EU health care; 2) lower pay-outs in disability insurance (est. at 500k in Year 1), and; 3) loss of economic output from unemployment. Approx. 2500 patients a year in Europe undergo these high risk operations with a cumulative paraplegia rate of over 15%; therefore >100M per year in costs can be avoided and significantly more considering the expected elimination of type II endoleaks.

Despite significant recent progress in the field of hematological malignancies (HMs), with increasing survival rates and improvement in quality of life, many children and adults with HMs still die from these disorders or experience disabling complications. Therefore, improvement of health care of HMs is an unmet medical need. Thus, it is important to define and align standard and efficient sets of HMs outcomes to measure and evaluate HM data for clinical decisions, long term risk/benefit profile, reimbursement, value analysis, and clinical trials design. Improving outcome measures and endpoint definitions by taking into account “real-life” data and differences in cross-national healthcare practice will undoubtedly result in an optimized, sustainable and effective treatment delivery, as well as in desirable and innovative accelerated pathways for novel drug availability. All these challenges will be addressed within a pan-EU perspective by HARMONY (Healthcare Alliance for Resourceful Medicines Offensive against Neoplasms in HematologY), a comprehensive public-private European consortium of excellence. HARMONY consortium is made up of 51 partners: 44 participants from 10 European countries and 7 pharmaceutical companies from the EFPIA. HARMONY aims to assemble, assess, connect, and analyze heterogeneous HM patient derived Big Data sets to define sets of outcome indicators that can be used for decision-making by key healthcare stakeholders. The consortium will orchestrate leading experts and working cooperative groups in HMs, European study alliances, pharmaceutical market leaders, patient advocacy groups, HTA and regulatory agencies, to: (i) optimize Europe-wide data collection and create a high-quality HM data repository for further explorative studies; (ii) establish a clinical data-sharing platform that empowers clinicians, patients and policy stakeholders to improve decision-making procedures and identify appropriate treatments to patients with HMs

Experts in virology, immunology and clinical hepatitis B patient care with an excellent research and translational track record in hepatitis B virus (HBV)-host interaction form the interdisciplinary TherVacB consortium. They jointly tackle the major challenges in HBV therapy – the virus’s resistance to cure. TherVacB aims at breaking immune tolerance in chronic HBV infection and achieving HBV cure. Occurrence of neutralizing antibodies and HBV-specific T cell responses characterize spontaneous resolution of HBV infection that are lacking in chronic infection. We will use our IP-protected heterologous prime-boost therapeutic vaccination scheme with proven efficacy in preclinical models of hepatitis B to target and activate B and T cell responses. Two protein prime injections with clinically approved, adjuvanted particulate HBV S and core protein antigens shall induce neutralizing antibodies and prime T cells that are boosted with an MVA vector expressing HBV core, S, L and polymerase antigens covering >95% of HBV found worldwide. Having secured significant funding and partnerships to obtain GMP-produced vaccine components and to prepare a first-in-human application, TherVacB aims at a clinical proof-of-concept of the therapeutic hepatitis B vaccine in patients with chronic hepatitis B. The consortium will establish a patient registry and perform a multi-center phase Ib/IIa clinical trial that aims at proving safety of the therapeutic vaccine and inducing immune control of chronic HBV infection. One study arm will be realized in Tanzania to build up local capacity, because Africa carries a large burden of HBV infection but lacks diagnostic and therapeutic options. An innovative immune monitoring will quantify HBV-specific immunity and define novel biomarkers to predict treatment response. Finally an ethical and an empirical study will evaluate the recruitment of patients by social media which is very effective for infectious diseases that tend to stigmatize patients