Project description
Advancing coordination of infrastructure to respond to highly infectious diseases
The outbreaks of the 21st century, from SARS, Ebola and Zika to the COVID-19 pandemic and Monkeypox, have demonstrated our global vulnerability to highly infectious diseases (HID). Prompt access to high-containment (biosafety levels (BSL) 3 & 4) laboratories is required for safely conducting research on HID. However, such facilities are rare and costly. The European Research Infrastructure on Highly Pathogenic Agents (ERINHA) was created to enable the coordination of high-containment services within the scientific community, including access to BSL3 and BSL4 facilities, expertise, and training. The EU-funded ERINHA-Advance project will contribute to the long-term sustainability of the ERINHA effort, increasing its membership, improving its services and addressing infectious disease events of public concern.
Objective
One of the great challenges of the 21st century is to develop the capacity to prevent and react to outbreaks caused by highly pathogenic human and animal microorganisms, which are generally characterized by a high mortality rate, unavailability of prophylactics or effective therapeutic treatment and high human-to-human transmission.
ERINHA AISBL (European Research Infrastructure on Highly Pathogenic Agents), a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) dedicated to the study of high-consequence pathogens of Risk Group 4 (RG4), entered into implementation phase in July 2017. It now aims to ensure its long-term sustainability to better answer societal challenges in the field of Science, Health and Security.
The overall aim of the ERINHA-Advance project is to implement actions that will contribute to the long-term sustainability of the ERINHA RI, through enlargement of its membership and partnership and strengthening the overall services offer and framework by fostering the innovation potential of the RI.
To reach these goals, the RI will focus on the following specific objectives:
1. Enlarge ERINHA’s membership and research capacities (WP2);
2. Improve users services (WP3);
3. Stimulate the innovation potential of ERINHA and identify the co-innovation opportunities with industry (WP4);
4. Strengthen the overall services framework through long-term data-management and data sharing rules, clarification of IPR regimes and definition and implementation of the quality assurance system of the RI and its national nodes (WP5);
5. Reinforce ERINHA’s European and International cooperation with relevant countries, initiatives and networks (WP2 and WP6).
By achieving these objectives, ERINHA-Advance will largely contribute to providing access to larger number of high containment facilities to European and international scientists and foster research and innovation in the field of highly infectious diseases.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
1050 Bruxelles / Brussel
Belgium