Despite the estimated 30 million people in Europe living with asthma, asthma control remains suboptimal. There is a demand for research and development of new and better approaches to improve disease manageability. CURE, an EU Horizon 2020 funded project, set out to explore the potential of phage intervention (virus) to rebalance the microbiome in the airways of people with asthma. If proved, this phage therapy would control the immune dysregulation of asthma, and eventually lead to a cure.
EFA led the communications within the dissemination work package of CURE, to inform the public, and in particular, people with asthma, about the results and outcomes of the project’s research. To that end, EFA published the 2021 CURE Annual Newsletter, conducted an interview with a leading researcher from the project, promoted and translated the webinar series and newsletter on social media and shared project developments through the CURE Twitter and LinkedIn accounts.
CURE’s outreach increased in 2021 under EFA’s leadership. The project’s Twitter follower base increased by 34% with an engagement rate of 0.9% while LinkedIn followers grew by 85% with an engagement rate of 2.1%.
Towards the end of 2021, EFA began planning the final event, hosted at the European Parliament in early 2022. The online conference, with MEP Tilly Metz (Greens/EFA, Luxembourg) as co-host, presented the unique findings of the project with an outlook towards how to bring the results to European legislation.