Project acronym: DISSECT
Title: DEVELOPMENT OF INTERVENTION STRATEGIES AGAINST SARS IN A EUROPEAN-CHINESE TASKFORCE

Website: http://www.cnb.csic.es/~webcoron/EUprojectdissect/

PARTICIPANTS

Advisors:
Malik Peiris. Department of Microbiology and Medicine, Queen Mary
Hospital, University of Hong Kong. Wilina Lim. Government Virus Unit, Queen Mary Hospital, Hong Kong, Special
Administrative Region, China. DingXiang Liu. School of Biology Science, Nanyang Technology University. Singapore.
1a. Luis Enjuanes (Coordinator) 1b. Juan Antonio Garcia
2.	Qi Xie (Co-coordinator)
3.	Peter J. M. Rottier

5.	Albert D. M. E. Osterhaus
6.	Anlong Xu
7.	Zhihong Hu
8.	Pilar Perez Breña
9.	Juan Plana-Duran
10.	Han van den Bosch

CNB-BM, CSIC CNB-GMP, CSIC IGDB, CAS Utrecht Univ. Erasmus Univ. Sun Yatsen Univ. WIV,CAS CNM-Virol, ISC III FD-Veterinaria SA Intervet UK Ltd/Nobilon

Madrid, Spain Madrid, Spain Beijing, China Utrecht, NL Rotterdam, NL Guangzhou,China Wuhan, China Madrid, Spain Girona, Spain Milton Keynes, UK

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Summary description of project objectives
This research proposal is comprehensive, encompassing all the complementary aspects necessary for the development of intervention strategies, including vaccination, immunotherapy, and antivirals to protect against SARS. In addition, techniques and materials will be generated to develop diagnostic kits that will lead to the identification of infected individuals at very early steps of the disease, and to differentiate between vaccinated and naturally infected people. The first focus of the project is vaccine development. Accordingly, a set of complementary strategies is proposed to guarantee the success. These strategies include “classical” vaccines (such as whole inactivated virus), subunit vaccines, and state of the art-recombinant technology derived vaccines. The second focus of the project is on the state of the art-therapeutic approaches, ranging from the use of monoclonal antibodies to specific antivirals. For achieving the primary objectives of this project, the availability of an adequate preclinical setting for SARS-CoV research, including animal models, as well as the access to relevant clinical samples are absolute preconditions. These all met in this project, as a result of the expertise of the individual groups involved. To develop this comprehensive project, laboratories from the European Union and China are collaborating. The laboratories from EU member states (Spain, UK and The Netherlands) have a longterm experience (more than twenty years) in coronavirus pathology, immunology and molecular biology. The groups from China have key knowledge on the onset and evolution of SARS, high technology, and have generated large collections of biological materials: viruses, sera, tissues, clinical and epidemiological data.