PERFORM
Personalised Risk assessment in febrile illness to optimise Real-life Management across the European Union
(Project lifecycle: 2016 - 2021)
The Problem
The management of febrile patients is one of the most common and important problems facing healthcare providers. Distinction between bacterial infections and trivial viral infection on clinical grounds is unreliable and, as a result, innumerable patients worldwide undergo hospitalisation, invasive investigation and are treated with antibiotics for presumed bacterial infection when, in fact, they are suffering from self-resolving viral infection.
The Solution
PERFORM aimed to develop a comprehensive management plan for febrile patients, capable of being rolled out in different healthcare systems across Europe, by linking sophisticated new genomic and proteomic approaches to careful clinical phenotyping, and building on pilot data from previous studies.
How?
By improving diagnosis and management of febrile patients, through application of sophisticated phenotypic, transcriptomic (genomic, proteomic) and bioinformatics approaches to well characterised large-scale, multi-national patient cohorts already recruited with EU funding. PERFORM identified and validated promising new discriminators of bacterial and viral infection including transcriptomic and clinical phenotype markers. The most accurate of these distinguishing between bacterial and viral infection, was evaluated in prospective cohorts of patients reflecting the different health care settings across European countries.
The PERFORM consortium, made up of 18 world renowned organisations, from 10 different countries, actively engaged with national and European wide policy-makers and stakeholders, to maximise the project’s reach and impact.
Latest results and outputs are available on the European Commission's CORDIS website