The European Commission has short-listed 11 new projects worth €120 million from Horizon Europe, the biggest European research and innovation programme (2021-2027), for supporting and enabling urgent research into the coronavirus and its variants. The 11 short-listed projects involve 312 research teams from 40 countries, including 38 participants from 23 countries outside of the EU.

This funding is part of a wide range of research and innovation actions taken to fight the coronavirus and contributes to the Commission's overall action to prevent, mitigate and respond to the impact of the virus and its variants, in line with the new European bio-defence preparedness plan HERA Incubator.

HERA Incubator will work with researchers, biotech companies, manufacturers and public authorities in the EU and globally to detect new variants, provide incentives to develop new and adapted vaccines, speed up the approval process for these vaccines, and ensure scaling up of manufacturing capacities.

Most of the new projects will support clinical trials for new treatments and vaccines, and the development of large-scale coronavirus cohorts and networks beyond Europe's borders, forging links with European initiatives. Other projects will reinforce and widen access to the research infrastructures providing services, or needed to share data, expertise, and research resources among researchers, to enable research addressing coronavirus and its variants. These infrastructures include those already active such as the European COVID-19 Data Platform and the relevant European Life Science Research Infrastructures.

The successful consortia will collaborate with other relevant initiatives and projects at national, regional, and international levels to maximise synergies and complementarity and avoid duplication of the research efforts. They will contribute to building the European Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), which will enable the EU to anticipate and better tackle future pandemics.

Image © European Parliament, 2021