Dumenil Lab

Research focus

ERC Advanced Grant · 2022

Destabilizing vascular colonization to stop meningitis

Before the antibiotic era chances of survival to bacterial meningitis were minimal. Nevertheless, nearly 100 years later, surprisingly little progress has been made and mortality rates currently remain unacceptably high (10-25%). Supported by clinical and experimental data, the central concept of the Destop project is that bacteria rapidly become insensitive to antibiotics during infection, which leads to treatment failure. We hypothesize that the emergence of such antibiotic insensitivity results from vascular colonization by Neisseria meningitidis i.e. when the bacteria adhere to the surface of the endothelium, proliferate and progressively occlude the vessel lumen. We propose to explore…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.