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The COVID-19 crisis has illuminated the weaknesses in our social and economic infrastructure while also highlighting the significance of healthcare systems, health professionals and the need for research and innovation to promptly and effectively address public health concerns. The following projects aim to develop therapeutic interventions for treating COVID-19, targeting mild to severe stages. All projects identified below are funded by the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funding programmes.
Supporting the global response to COVID-19 and future pandemics
By investigating the circulation and impact of current and emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOC), ENDVOC aims to evaluate and support effective pandemic responses. To do so, it will use data from well-established patient and population cohorts across the world.
CoVICIS is a three year project funded by the EU Horizon Europe program. It is led by Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) involving 14 partners from 7 countries – Switzerland, Italy, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Ethiopia and South Africa. CoVICIS’ unique strength is its combined expertise with world leading scientists in the fields of epidemiology, genomics, virology, immunology, data science and public health, coupled with state-of-the-art cutting edge technologies in bioscience.
ECRAID-Prime is one of the six projects funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program to drive therapeutic and vaccines clinical trials to boost COVID-19 treatment and prevention. Launched in December 2021, it will be the first-of-its-kind European Adaptive Platform Trial on COVID-19 therapeutics in the primary care setting. The project will build on many years of EU investment in infrastructure for primary care trials and a mature primary care research network that has pioneered novel, efficient, platform clinical trial designs.
The primary objective of the project is to mature, optimise and demonstrate an AI-powered cloud-based system for patient’s lung health assessment and monitoring, which integrates an intelligent sensor device – PyXy – and machine learning to increase the efficiency and the quality of the care delivery to patients from risk groups, especially under a pandemic outbreak.
EuCARE answers to an emergency call from the European Union, in the frame of the Horizon Europe programme, to confront the COVID-19 epidemics and in particular the newly emerging SARS-COV-2 variants under several aspects.
The icovid project is the continuation of the pro bono Belgian icovid initiative, which resulted in the development of icolung, a lung imaging AI solution. Co-funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program, the project has grown into a multicenter European project aiming to further develop and roll out icolung into 800 European centers.
icolung, a cloud-based AI software for the analysis of non-contrast chest CT helps detect COVID-19 at an early stage and quantifies the extent of lung lesions.
The iMPact project aims to demonstrate that the asset MP1032 is a promising new candidate for the early intervention treatment of COVID-19 patients. MP1032 is a first-in-class drug candidate that targets cellular oxidative stress and thereby reduces inflammatory markers such as TNF-alpha, IL-6, IL-12 which makes it highly promising for early intervention treatment of COVID-19.
The main objective of EPIC-CROWN-2 is to rapidly assess, in multicentric clinical trials, an EMA-authorized antiviral immunotherapy based on potent and broad equine neutralizing anti-SARS-CoV-2 polyclonal F(ab’)2 antibodies in COVID-19 patients, including VOC carriers. In order to save lives and reduce the use and costs of critical care, this therapeutic solution is expected to reduce at least by 50% ICUs admissions and a highly significant mortality rate of treated patients.
As a reaction to the coronavirus disease, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme has set up an innovation action to support projects developing tools and technologies to improve surveillance and care of COVID-19 patients.
In ENVISION, 21 partners from 13 European countries come together to collect data and increase our knowledge of the disease in order to advance an innovative digital tool, the Sandman.MD, a real-time and plug-and-play monitoring app, to an intelligent decision-support system for monitoring, prediction and treatment of COVID-19 patients in ICUs – the Sandman.ICU. This innovative digital tool enhanced by Artificial Intelligence will be validated at our 13 clinical partners and made available soon afterward.
VERDI aims to address these issues by answering research questions on the impact of SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern in pregnant women, infants, children and adolescents primarily through observational cohort studies. VERDI will also focus on populations at increased risk for mpox, such as people living with HIV and people attending sexual health clinics.
Finally, VERDI will develop research preparedness in case there are changes in the ongoing outbreaks and possible (re-)emergence of future infections. The network will build on the well-established cohort partners involved across the world.
RECOVER is one of the 18 projects that the European Union has founded in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to obtain crucial unknown information about the disease through clinical research to help the EU fight the virus and save patients’ lives. The research from RECOVER will help improve the EU’s response to future epidemics and pandemics. The goal of RECOVER is to understand the COVID-19 pandemic through clinical research in order to transform patient care and public health responses.
MANCO – Monoclonal Antibodies against COVID-19 – is an EU research project funded under the Horizon 2020 programme. The MANCO project is coordinated by the Erasmus Medical Centre (EMC) based in The Netherlands. The project has started on 1st March 2020 and will last about 3 years. MANCO is a collaborative research project bringing together a complementary and highly experienced group of 8 partners from 4 European countries (The Netherlands, Germany, Spain and France) that will achieve the critical mass required to deliver the ambitious objectives of this research programme.
Overall, The MANCO project aims at contributing to the rapid international response against COVID-19, through preclinical and clinical evaluation of monoclonal antibodies against this coronavirus. More specifically, MANCO will advance one lead (prophylactic and/ or therapeutic) monoclonal antibody to reach preclinical package completion, by leveraging clinical expertise, infrastructure and relevant network.
CORONADX is an EU-funded project to develop new SARS CoV-2 detection instruments requiring little or no training and eliminating the need to send samples to central laboratories. Faster and more widespread tests will be key to controlling the COVID-19 pandemic and limit lockdowns. Its goal is to provide systems that will give a reliable response in minutes.
The Antibody Therapy Against Coronavirus consortium, ATAC, aims at developing passive immunotherapy against COVID-19. Human antibodies will be obtained from blood of CoV-recovered donors with three independent approaches: polyclonal gamma-globulins, B cell monoclonals and phage libraries. Antibodies will be characterized by rapid experimental and computational work, optimized, produced and tested in consultation with EMA to ensure prompt embedding of regulatory aspects.
The purpose behind the RBDCOV project is to offer a new tool towards controlling the pandemic for the short, medium and long term, and to manufacture and test the first recombinant protein-based vaccine* that may be authorised in Europe.
RBDCOV aims to generate robust data to demonstrate the safety and immunogenicity* of this vaccine given as a booster* vaccination to induce a higher and more durable immune response*, for potential new variants.
COVIRNA is a patient-centred Innovation Action aiming to generate a diagnostic tool to identify COVID-19 patients at risk of developing fatal cardiovascular complications. The overall goal of the COVIRNA project is to generate a diagnostic test based on cardiovascular RNA biomarkers highly predictive of the clinical outcomes of COVID-19 patients and to enable its rapid market uptake with the aim to improve individualised surveillance, care and follow-up of these patients in the context of the current pandemic.
The VASCOVID project was selected in the European Commission’s emergency call for innovation action as one of the 23 projects which involve 347 research groups from 40 countries. This EU funding will allow researchers to address the pandemic and its aftermath, strengthen industrial capacity to manufacture and deploy readily available solutions, develop medical technologies and digital tools, improve understanding of socioeconomic impacts and behaviors during the pandemic, and learn as much as possible about the disease from large databases of patient groups across Europe. Vascovid is one of the thirteen projects selected by the European Commission special call for addressing the pandemic. The selected projects, with total funding of € 55.2 million, will deliver solutions in four complementary areas, with planned first prototypes being available in the coming 6 to 12 months.
The core technologies of the VASCOVID project are based on near-infrared light which penetrates deep (>1 cm) into the tissues and returns important clinical information. In particular, we will use time-resolved near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS). They will allow us to measure microvascular blood oxygen saturation, blood volume and blood flow and estimate oxygen metabolism. By combining these methods with a vascular occlusion test induced by sustained arterial occlusion of the palm, we will evaluate the functioning of the microvasculature and the endothelium.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HADEA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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