Project description
Mass screening method for pandemics
The aftermath of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has highlighted the need for improved preparedness against future pathogen outbreaks. To contain pathogen transmission, a large-scale testing strategy must be deployed as soon as possible and until therapies and vaccines become available. The EU-funded PCR 4 ALL project supports polymerase chain reaction (PCR) as the ideal front-line method and aims to increase its capacity while reducing the cost. A PCR diagnostic assay uses the genome of the pathogen and can be easily designed. The consortium proposes to demonstrate the technical feasibility of carrying out 100 000 tests per day and the utility of this strategy in the fight against pandemics.
Objective
The COVID-19 pandemic has not only affected our health, but also our lifestyles and our economies. Given its high non-symptomatic transmissibility, to stop a pandemic-causing pathogen like SARS-CoV-2 early on its tracks without needing to resort to economy-damaging measures, would have required a mass testing strategy very early on: according to some estimates up to 10% of a nation’s population should have been tested on a daily basis to achieve this. Given the exponential growth tendency of pandemic-causing respiratory viruses, as soon as such pathogen is identified a large-scale testing campaign should immediate be deployed (a strategy adopted successfully in very densely populated areas of China). And given the long periods required to develop other pandemic-fighting strategies (i.e. such as vaccines and quick diagnostic tests), PCR-based mass testing could be the ideal front line of defense, since it can be developed in only a few weeks after decoding the genetic map of the pathogen. But although PCR testing capacity has greatly been increased worldwide, regularly testing large fractions of the population would still remain prohibitively costly with current technology.
The PCR-4-ALL consortium (combining expertise in diagnostics, high-throughput-screening, virology, disease modelling, econometrics and digital health platforms) will aim to demonstrate the technical feasibility of carrying out population-wide PCR testing by demonstrating a capacity of >10^5 tests in a single day and platform, in an extremely cost-effective manner (at least 2 orders of magnitude cheaper than currently). We will, furthermore, evaluate the effectiveness of utilizing this strategy as the main pandemic-fighting measure by assessing its ability to minimize, or even prevent, the need to implement other costly and partially ineffective measures (i.e. lockdowns and vaccination campaigns).
Fields of science
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologyvirology
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencespublic healthepidemiologypandemics
- medical and health scienceshealth sciencesinfectious diseasesRNA virusescoronaviruses
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepharmacology and pharmacypharmaceutical drugsvaccines
- engineering and technologymedical engineeringmedical laboratory technologydiagnostic technologies
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
3000 Leuven
Belgium