Horizon: Research infrastructure services for rapid research responses to COVID-19 and other infectious disease epidemics

Expected Outcome

Project results are expected to contribute to all the following expected outcomes:

• comprehensive catalogue of research infrastructure services relevant to tackle infectious diseases epidemics is available, including services supporting pertinent social sciences research;
• fast assembly and provision of innovative, customised and efficient research infrastructure services to support research linked to detecting, assessing and combatting newly emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants;
• challenge driven integration of research infrastructures to better support research addressing infectious diseases and face epidemics, including for use by epidemics risk assessment and risk management bodies (such as the European Centre for Disease prevention and Control (ECDC), the World Health Organisation (WHO), the World Organisation of Animal Health (OIE) and national epidemics management bodies);
• rapid response to epidemics outbreaks through research infrastructure services underpinning and supporting research aiming to understand causes and development of the epidemic;
• development of novel/adapted epidemics intervention tools and measures enabled by relevant research infrastructure (RI) services;
• availability of research data emerging from access provision activities for re-use on common data platforms and registries, according to FAIR principles and compliant with legal provisions under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Scope

Proposals under this action, will integrate research infrastructure services to form a comprehensive and inclusive portfolio to support research in response to infectious disease epidemics or underpinning respective forefront research in the field. As a first immediate challenge, the delivered services should support research targeting newly emerging SARS-Cov-2 variants and addressing the on-going COVID-19 pandemic.

Proposals will support the provision of trans-national and/or virtual access to researchers as well as training for using the infrastructures, and activities to improve, customise and integrate the services the infrastructures provide, so as to facilitate and integrate the access procedures and to further develop the remote or virtual provision of services.

Expected Impact

Proposals should set out a credible pathway to contributing to several of the following impacts

• enhancement of EU capacity to identify, characterise and mitigate the effects of COVID-19 virus variants of concern, and future emerging pathogens of public health concern;
• reinforced research infrastructures capacity to provide at scale and across the EU services to support excellent research to address societal challenges, and Horizon Europe objectives;
• enhanced and increased society’s long-term and consistent problem-solving capacity and evidence-based policy making in areas linked to health, including a better understanding of socio-economic implications, through the provision of innovative, customised and efficient RI services;
• new discoveries and knowledge breakthroughs enabled by access provision to the best and in some cases unique state-of-the-art RIs;
• a new generation of researchers trained to optimally exploit all the essential and advanced tools for their research.

Deadline

06 May 2021

More information

Horizon Europe – Call