GSS EU Science Funding Gateway

The scope of the proposals submitted under this call topic should include one or more of the following areas:

• Clinical development of therapeutics. This can include early phase testing of candidates for safety, validation of standardised animal models that adequately recapitulate the clinical hallmarks of human infection and illness to enable acceleration of regulatory pathways for vaccines and therapeutics, or platform trial designs or networks that can be pivoted to outbreaks where they occur. Best practices for the use and deployment of intervention tools, including storage and transport should be considered.
• Clinical development of point-of-care (POC) diagnostics, ensuring rapid evaluation of POC tools based on existing technologies to allow for fast case detection and better surveillance. It should be possible that the developed diagnostic tools can easily be taken up by health care systems and health care centres, also in rural settings.
• Social sciences research to improve risk communication activities, provide responses to social dynamics of Ebola virus outbreaks and increase acceptance of the public health response and medical countermeasures.

Vulnerable populations need to be included in the clinical study population, including children, pregnant women, people with co-infections and comorbidities, older people and people living in hard-to-reach communities (unless excluded for physiologic or metabolic reasons). Collaboration and coordination with existing outbreak response initiatives and ongoing Ebola research actions are highly encouraged to facilitate knowledge exchange, collaboration, synergies, and coordination of response activities. Community engagement should be supported.