The European Commission has allocating a further €128 million to projects for innovative and rapid health-related approaches to respond to COVID-19 and to deliver quick results for society for a higher level of preparedness of health systems. Twenty-three projects, which involve 347 research teams from 40 countries in Europe and beyond were funded.

Six Irish projects secured over €2.9 million in this call and 9 researchers and companies were funded. Two of the projects are led by Irish researchers.

According to Kay Duggan-Walls, National Contact Point for Horizon 2020, ‘Irish applicants did particularly well in the area of medical technologies, digital tools and artificial intelligence analytics as well as networking of existing EU and international cohorts of relevance to COVID-19’.

The successful projects are:

PORSAV, Controlling viral aerosols in COVID-19 and beyond is led by Palliare Ltd with partners Ronan Cahill, UCD, and Pintail. The project focusses on the completion and testing of two medical devices for improving the security conditions of healthcare workers in the Operating Room by preventing gas spread.

COVID-X, COVID eXponential Programme is led by F6S Network Ltd. This project aims at developing a collaborative network of technology and health stakeholders composed of entrepreneurs, Startups, SMEs and technologists to support COVID-19 solutions in testing, piloting and deployment operations.

INNO4COV, Boosting Innovation for COVID-19 Diagnostic, Prevention and Surveillance. This project aims at developing an open-access platform to offer companies and reference laboratories expertise, networks, and services required for the development, prototyping, testing, and market exploitation of activities related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Prof. Adriele Prina Mello (TCD), as partner and Dissemination and Communication WP leader says: ‘We will launch opportunities for national indigenous and multinational SMEs and Innovators in the COVID-19 space where to jointly assist their product development with the INNOV4COV-19 business development and sustainability team’. For further information please contact: info@inno4cov19.eu

VASCOVID, Portable platform for the assessment of microvascular health in covid-19 patients at the intensive care. The project will develop a portable, non-invasive monitoring platform for the assessment of microvascular health in Covid-19 patients requiring mechanical ventilation in the intensive care setting. The project will enable real-time evaluation of cardiopulmonary interactions and will provide clinical information of heart-lung interactions in critically ill patients. VASCOVID will support ventilatory strategies with a specific target to reduce extubation failure during the process of weaning patients from mechanical ventilation. The Irish partner in this project is BioPixS Ltd, which is a Tyndall, UCC spinout. 

CorDial-S, Portable and fast surface plasmon resonance. The project aims to develop a point-of-care testing device that is portable and easy-to-operate for fast COVID-19 diagnosis in nasopharyngeal and saliva samples at a low cost. Magnostics Ltd as a partner in this project.

unCoVer, Unravelling Data for Rapid Evidence-Based Response to COVID-19. The project is a functional network of research institutions collecting data derived from the provision of care to COVID-19 patients by health systems across Europe and internationally. The Irish partners are Paul Hynds, TUDublin and Zubair Kabir, UCC.

See a link to the Press Release from the European Commission https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_20_1460

Details of the funded proposals are available here

https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/research_and_innovation/events/documents/facsheet_call2_projects-10-august-2020.pdf