Project of the Month: Ramping up EU research excellence to combat COVID-19

As the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19 has taken a firm hold in Europe, several ongoing research projects have reoriented their work to focus on the outbreak. This month we’re sharing our ‘Project of the Month’ feature between two such projects, PREPARE and EVAg/EVA-GLOBAL.

Health

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The PREPARE project ensures research preparedness of clinical treatment sites and the use of harmonised research protocols across Europe through their network of 3 000 hospitals and 900 laboratories in 42 countries.

Meanwhile, the EVAg team (which since January 2020 has formally morphed into a new successor project EVA-GLOBAL) has already made available more than 1 000 kits that support the diagnosis of the novel coronavirus, to 79 countries worldwide.

As a response to the outbreak, the European Commission launched an emergency request for expressions of interest for projects that will advance our understanding of the novel coronavirus epidemic to the tune of EUR 10 million.

“Carrying out clinical research in PREPARE will provide real-time evidence for clinical management of patients and for informing public health responses.”
- Herman Goossens, PREPARE project coordinator

“Thanks to emergency research funding from Horizon 2020, we will know more about the disease. I am proud that following the progress made during the last years, our supercomputer centres stand ready to help researchers in their work to develop new treatment and vaccines.”

- Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education & Youth

If you are interested in having your project featured in ‘Project of the Month’ in an upcoming issue, please send us an email to [e-mail] and tell us why!

Keywords

coronavirus

Countries

France