COMPARE aims to harness the rapid advances in molecular technology to improve identification and mitigation of emerging infectious diseases and foodborne outbreaks. To this purpose COMPARE will establish a “One serves all” analytical framework and data exchange platform that will allow real time analysis and interpretation of sequence-based pathogen data in combination with associated data (e.g. clinical, epidemiological data) in an integrated inter-sectorial, interdisciplinary, international, “one health” approach. The framework will link research, clinical and public health organisations active in human health, animal health, and food safety in Europe and beyond, to develop (i) integrated risk assessment and risk based collection of samples and data, (ii) harmonised workflows for generating comparable sequence and associated data, (iii) state-of-the-art analytical workflows and tools for generating actionable information for support of patient diagnosis, treatment, outbreak detection and -investigation and (iv) risk communication tools. The analytical workflows will be linked to a flexible, scalable and open-source data- and information platform supporting rapid sharing, interrogation and analysis of sequence-based pathogen data in combination with other associated data. The system will be linked to existing and future complementary systems, networks and databases such as those used by ECDC, NCBI and EFSA. The functionalities of the system will be tested and fine tuned through underpinning research studies on priority pathogens covering healthcare-associated infections, food-borne disease, and (zoonotic) (re-) emerging diseases with epidemic or pandemic potential. Throughout the project, extensive consultations with future users, studies into the barriers to open data sharing, dissemination and training activities and studies on the cost-effectiveness of the system will support future sustainable user uptake.

The overall objective will be to create and mobilise an International network of high calibre centres around a strong European group of institutes selected for their appropriate expertises, to collect, amplify, characterise, standardise, authenticate, distribute and track, mammalian and other exotic viruses. The network of EVAg laboratories including 25 institutions represents an extensive range of virological disciplines. The architecture of the consortium is based on the association of capacities accessible to the partners but also to any end-users through the EVAg web-based catalogue. This concept has been elaborated and tested for its efficiency during the successful EVA project (FP7). The project will integrate more facilities dedicated to high risk pathogen (HRP) manipulation (1 in EVA, 13 in EVAg) The access to products derived from those HRP will be enhanced and for instance the production of diagnostic reagents will be facilitated. The new project will also provide access to high containment biosafety facilities to carry out in vivo studies of infectious disease using natural or models hosts, to look at prophylactic or therapeutic control measures and to develop materials for the evaluation of diagnostic tests, meaning an extensive capacity to service and to training. EVAg will also link up with other network-based virus-associated programmes that exist globally. However, looking further ahead, EVAg is conceived ultimately to be an open entity aiming at developing synergies and complementarity capabilities in such a way as to offer an improved access to researchers. This project will generate the largest collection of mammalian viruses in the world and move beyond the current state-of-the-art to provide an increasingly valuable resource and service to the world’s scientific community, including government health departments, higher education institutes, industry and, through information systems, the general public.

With over 25% of the global disease burden, only 3% of global clinical trials occur in Africa. This disproportion is driven by inadequacies in clinical research capacity, regulatory process ambiguity, deficient regional patient and disease area data, and lack of visibility of existing clinical research capabilities in Africa. To address this disproportion, this proposal seeks to establish the Clinical Trials Community Africa Network (CTCAN), a collaborative framework of key clinical research stakeholders in the African region, pharma partners, and other relevant international stakeholders, with the overarching goal of bringing more clinical trials to the region in a sustainable and coordinated manner. This collaboration will map and draw on the experience and expertise of already existing networks and initiatives. It will create a network of subnetworks that will foster coordination in clinical research, by ensuring and encouraging alignment in disease area prioritization, raising awareness and visibility of existing capacity from sites and labs across Africa, operationalising the regulatory processes across the region, and strengthen less experienced sites and labs through a clinical trial preparedness framework, while encouraging inter- and cross-continental knowledge and expertise sharing. CTCAN will use and expand the Clinical Trials Community (CTC) platform, an electronic platform consolidating data on researchers, regulations, sites, and epidemiology across the continent. The result will be an ever-present and ready-to-go pool of clinical research sites and labs with the agility to rapidly address new and emerging global health threats, epidemics, and pandemics, thereby efficiently contributing towards clinical research in pandemic preparedness. CTCAN will lay the foundation for a sustainable network of clinical trial sites and laboratories in sub-Saharan Africa by leveraging and initiating collaboration between existing sub-networks, funders, and pharma.