The European Commission announced last week that 11 new projects worth €120 million have been shortlisted by Horizon Europe, to enable urgently needed research into the coronavirus and its variants. Euro-BioImaging is very proud to be part of two of the projects selected by Horizon Europe, and looks forward to providing open access to biological and biomedical imaging services to gain new knowledge about coronavirus variants and other infectious diseases.
The ISIDORe consortium, coordinated by our partner research infrastructure, ERINHA, proposes to assemble the largest and most diverse research and service providing consortium to study infectious diseases in Europe, from structural biology to clinical trials. Giving scientists access to the whole extent of the consortium members state-of-the-art facilities, cutting edge services, advanced equipment and expertise, in an integrated way and with a common goal, will enable and accelerate the generation of new knowledge and intervention tools to ultimately help our societies getting closer to control SARS-CoV-2 in particular, and epidemic prone pathogens in general.
Within this context, and in collaboration with our Nodes, Euro-BioImaging will offer open access to cutting-edge biological and biomedical imaging services and expertise from world-class imaging facilities to support multidisciplinary research projects with an emphasis on SARS-CoV2-variants at the start.
Laboratory Officer Nicole Schieber working in EMBL's Electron Microscopy Core Facility. PHOTO: Viola Oorschot/EMBL
Beyond-COVID (BY-COVID), coordinated by ELIXIR, aims to provide comprehensive open data on SARS-CoV-2, and other infectious diseases across scientific, medical, public health and policy domains. The project will have a strong emphasis on mobilising raw viral sequences, helping to identify and monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants. It will further accelerate access to and linking of data and metadata on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, enable federated data analysis, and harmonisation and management of meta-data and sample- identifiers, as well as long-term cataloguing to ensure interoperability of national and global efforts.
Within this context, Euro-Bioimaging will provide support to ensure that image data from COVID-19 research is FAIR and included in public repositories, such as the BioImage Archive.
Learn more about some possible applications of imaging for virus research in this article with examples of virus research from Euro-BioImaging Nodes:
https://www.eurobioimaging.eu/news/how-imaging-technologies-contribute-to-understanding-viruses-/
Learn more about COVID-19 Fast Track at Euro-BioImaging:
https://www.eurobioimaging.eu/news/fast-track-access-to-biological-and-biomedical-imaging-technologies-for-covid-19-research-projects-/
Learn more about recently funded Horizon Europe projects:
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_21_3803
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