EU To Mobilize €10m For Zika Virus Research
This article was originally published in Scrip
Following the World Health Organization's declaration that the Zika virus outbreak in Latin America constitutes a global public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), the European Commission is planning to mobilize €10m in emergency funding for research aimed at determining whether there is a link between the virus and severe brain malformations in newborns.
If such a link is proven, the funding, which will come from the "Horizon 2020" research program and is being provided under a fast-track procedure triggered by the commission's research and innovation directorate general, could then be used to help develop potential vaccines, treatments and diagnostics.
As the research would be an additional topic under the Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2016-17 for Societal Challenges, the commission has asked the program committee, which is made up of representatives of member states, to give their approval, which is expected by mid-February, a commission spokesperson said. Once this is done, a €10m call for research proposals will be published in mid-March, with a short deadline for proposals of six weeks.
The EU Health Commissioner, Carlos Moedas, said that while the risk of transmission of the Zika virus in the EU was still extremely low, there was currently no treatment or vaccine against the virus "and that is everyone's problem. Our European values demand that we do not leave other countries to deal with such outbreaks alone," he declared.
The issue is also on the agenda of the Health Security Committee, which brings together representatives of the member states and the European Commission, following the activation of the EU's "Early Warning and Response System" for medical emergencies. The committee will meet regularly to coordinate Zika virus prevention and readiness, starting on Feb. 9, the commission said.
The EU moves follow a "rapid risk assessment" of the potential association of the Zika virus with microcephaly and Guillain-Barré syndrome carried out by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which said that in the absence of treatments and vaccines, prevention is based on personal protection measures like those applied for dengue and chikungunya infections.
Other R&D Projects
Moedas noted that the Horizon 2020 program, which is a successor to the research Framework Programs, is already financing projects that could help tackle the Zika virus. One of these is a €40m call for research into a vaccine for malaria and neglected infectious diseases, "which includes the Zika virus."
The call for this project was launched on Oct. 20, 2015, with a deadline for proposals of April 13, 2016. The commission says the specific challenge in this call will be to shift the "risk curve" so as to better select successful candidates, and discard those with a higher risk of failure, at an earlier stage in development. Proposals will need to address bottlenecks in the discovery, preclinical and early clinical development of new vaccine candidates, and may range from large research platforms developing multiple candidates to proposals focussing on one disease.
Moedas noted that the EU is also co-funding research into the area of prevention of infectious diseases within the Network of the EU, Latin America and the Caribbean Countries (ERANet-LAC). A call has been launched, with a deadline of March 10, for proposals in areas such as early detection, new therapeutic strategies leading to reduced antimicrobial resistance or other complications, and molecular epidemiological studies leading to clinical trials or prediction and prevention tools and strategies.
Swift Response
The response to the Zika outbreak has been swift, spurred in part by the experience with the Ebola virus emergency in West Africa, when public authorities and industry were criticized for their sluggishness in tackling the outbreak, which affected mainly Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The extent of the outbreak and the potential link to birth defects – not to mention the upcoming Olympic Games in Brazil – are other factors behind this upsurge in interest.
On the R&D front, a whole range of potential Zika virus vaccine projects are under way, with the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Sanofi Pasteur, GlaxoSmithKline, NewLink Genetics, GeneOne, Valneva and GeoVax Labs all having announced research programs.
Other companies working in this area include Inovio Pharmaceuticals, which is conducting Zika vaccine research, and Cerus Corp, whose Intercept system for inactivating viruses in blood transfusions was approved in Brazil last September. "With serious outbreaks of viruses such as dengue, zika, and chikungunya becoming more common in Brazil, transmission of pathogens via blood transfusion remains an ongoing threat," Cerus said at the time.