Networking of existing EU and international cohorts of relevance to COVID-19

Topic description

Specific Challenge:

Several large-scale cohorts are supported in Europe and the world with valuable information on health of individuals and various factors that might be associated to the perturbation of health. Such existing cohorts might provide key information relevant to COVID-19, including on risk factors, the benefits and risks of healthcare interventions including medicines and on the impact of vaccination. However, the challenge is to be able to identify and extract a sufficiently high number of cases with corresponding high-quality data that can be used across the different cohorts. Consequently, existing cohorts should be brought together in a common effort to standardize data associated to COVID-19 and extract information that will help ensuring optimal prevention, protection and treatment of citizens.

Proposals under this coordination and support action should support the international networking of existing, mainly longitudinal, cohorts in order to extract jointly agreed standardized data on COVID-19 diagnosed/serotyped and matched non-infected individuals. This effort should contribute to help in the identification of key factors influencing the susceptibility to infection and clinical manifestation, to assess the optimized therapeutic and clinical management options, and to derive lessons on the health and socio-economic impacts of the pandemic. They should develop cohort readiness to adapt rapidly to future crisis. Proposals should consider strategies to interact with the COVID-19 cohort(s) that will be funded under this expression of interest and international initiatives on cohorts, as well as liaising with the network of clinical trials on COVID-19.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 2 and 3 million would allow these specific challenges to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

• Pooling of data from multiple existing cohorts that will inform on key aspects related to COVID-19 and provide evidence-based recommendations for health policies in preventive strategies, protective actions, and disease management.
• Creating a cohort framework to rapidly address pandemics in the future.

Open Innovation
Gender
Socio-economic science and humanities