ISIDORe – Integrated Services for Infectious Disease Outbreak Research
The ISIDORe project provides an integrated portfolio of cutting-edge research services and resources to study epidemic-prone pathogens including SARS-CoV-2.
Project Website:
https://isidore-project.eu
Project Period:
2022 – 2025
The ISIDORe – “Integrated Services for Infectious Disease Outbreak Research” project was officially launched on 24th February 2022 under the Horizon Europe Framework Programme in response to the call on Research infrastructure services for rapid research responses to COVID-19 and other infectious disease epidemics (HORIZON-INFRA-2021-EMERGENCY-02). The 21M€ EU-funded large-scale project assembles an unprecedented One Health-driven, integrated portfolio of cutting-edge research services and resources, ranging from fundamental to applied, dedicated to the study of epidemic-prone diseases including SARS-CoV-2 variants.
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown the crucial need for an elevated capacity of preparedness and responsiveness to epidemic-prone pathogens at EU and global levels. In all health crises of the 21st century, from SARS, MERS, Ebola and Zika, to the current COVID19 pandemic, there has been a lack of coordination and insufficient application of interdisciplinary approaches. These deficits need to be addressed to successfully deal with the next pandemic outbreak.
ISIDORe will contribute to Europe’s prowess to tackle any epidemic-prone pathogen through a global, integrated and preparedness-driven approach. At the forefront of this approach is the provision of free-of-charge access to cutting-edge resources and services to scientific user communities for supporting their research projects in the field of infectious diseases in “peaceful times” as well as during outbreaks or epidemics.
This massive interdisciplinary project coordinated by ERINHA, is funded by the European Commission Horizon-Europe programme through the HERA incubator call and brings together all key European life-sciences research infrastructures and networks, as well as those in the social sciences. The Consortium brings together 154 partners under the umbrella of INSTRUCT, EUBIOIMAGING, EUOPENSCREEN, ECRIN, EATRIS, BBMRI, INFRAFRONTIER, EMBRC, ELIXIR, ERINHA, EVAg, VETBIONET, INFRAVEC, SONAR GLOBAL, TRANSVAC, MIRRI and EMERGEN.
INFRAFRONTIER Contribution to ISIDORe
INFRAFRONTIER is involved in several integral aspects of ISIDORe. Namely, INFRAFRONTIER:
- Assists in the coordination of transnational access (TNA) activities i.e., coordination of service provision and implementation of a preparedness-driven approach for TNA activities dedicated to non-SARS-CoV-2 epidemic-prone pathogens (WP2)
- Supports ISIDORe FAIR data management and data services for reuse and reproducibility (WP3)
- Co-leads the ISIDORe data mobilisation effort (WP3)
- Co-leads a WP on a ‘multidisciplinary approach for QM, Data, ELSI, training and customer satisfaction measures’ (WP4)
- Mapping quality criteria and requirements to improve and facilitate biospecimen handling procedures across partners for infectious diseases services (WP4)
- Leads the effort for ISIDORe service users and service providers feedback assessment i.e., collection of best practices and lessons learnt to improve service provision (WP4)
Via ISIDORe, INFRAFRONTIER supports preclinical COVID-19 research by providing trans-national access to services for the evaluation of anti-viral therapeutics and novel vaccine candidates in an infection pipeline using K18-hACE2 mice and novel COVID-19 mouse models to study SARS-CoV-2 pathology. These mouse models can be used for the examination of SARS-CoV-2 infection and its overall pathogenesis and include AAV-hACE humanisation constructs, mACE2-hACE2 mice, CMV-hACE2 mice, as well as conditional-hACE2 mice. INFRAFRONTIER also provides a multi-site immuno-analysis of infectious samples. Based on the principle of metal tag detection by mass cytometry, this technique allows in-house analysis of samples from distant BSL3 labs hosting specific infectious models of interest.