About the Project

The Pneumopath project represents a new approach to research into Streptococcus pneumoniae being a comprehensive study of the host-pathogen interactions during infection with the objective of identifying new targets for diagnosis and treatment.  

The singularity of Pneumopath lies in its multi-facted approach, its breadth of study of bacterial strains and of individual susceptibility and its computational analysis. 

The project comprised six distinct but overlapping scientific workpackages with different objectives:

Workpackage 1

(lead by the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control) -  a study of the molecular epidemiology and genetic characterisation of antibiotic susceptible and resistant pneumococcal isolates.

Workpackage 2 

(lead by the University of Leicester) - a study into the identification of new host loci confering innate resistance (or susceptibility) to invasive pneumococcal disease.

Workpackage 3

(lead by the University of Siena) - a study into the definition of parameters of pneumococcal infection in the animal host.

Workpackage 4

(lead by Radboud University) - a study into the definition of parameters of pneumococcal infection in in vitro cell culture models.

Workpackage 5

(lead by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Toulouse) - a study of the features of the central metabolism of Steptococcus pneumonaie.

Workpackage 6

(lead by the Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores, Lisbon) - through a semantic web infrastructure, the development of a shared data repository and dedicated data processing facilities for the subsequent analysis of project data.

The collection of experiments and analyses is ideally suited to a European collaboration. 

The exchange and discussion of data from partners' investigations will be discussed at regular project meetings.