Top Sector Life Sciences & Health (LSH) supports innovative research realised by public-private partnerships (PPP) in the LSH sector. With the ongoing Match Call, research organisations, health foundations and companies (start-ups, SMEs and industry) are invited to jointly invest in research and development (R&D) for the benefit of evidence-based innovation. By doing this, they will jointly help build a strong and sustainable LSH sector that contributes to the global challenge “Health and Care”.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has overshadowed the beginning of 2020. While the whole world is uniting forces and battling the disease, it is still very uncertain how the situation will develop.
COVID-19 belongs to the coronaviruses (CoV), which is a large family of RNA viruses and are known to result in respiratory infections. In origin, CoV are zoonotic, but they can evolve into diseases that spread to humans and which can ultimately lead to fatal illness.
The first time the world was shook by a large CoV outbreak was in 2002/2003 with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS-CoV) in China. In 2012, another variant of the coronavirus hit the Middle East hard with the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV).
COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020. To prevent the disease from spreading, research projects have been set up at a rapid pace. International stakeholders in the public and private sector are collaborating to contain the spread of the COVID-19 and to prevent future outbreaks. Click here to stay up to date on COVID-19 funding opportunities.
Since the foundation of Top Sector Life Sciences & Health (LSH; Health~Holland), it has supported numerous projects with research into coronaviruses. Four of these projects are shortly outlined below.
The project “development of vaccines to improve porcine health” started in 2015 and was completed in 2019 with Utrecht University and MSD joining forces. The porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) is an emerging coronavirus which can cause severe diarrhea with a fatality rate of almost 100% in young piglets. In order to protect animals against this serious infection, piglets can be vaccinated with live-attenuated virus (LAV) vaccines. The aim of this project was to develop a recombinant LAV vaccine against PEDV. The additional benefit of this project was that it also provided important insights in reverse-genetics vaccine strategies against coronaviruses in general. This is important, since coronaviruses have a zoonotic potential. Concluding, this project forms the basis for vaccine strategies against emerging zoonotic coronaviruses in human beings.
The project “a live attenuated vaccine against coronaviruses” is a follow-up of the former described project between Utrecht University and Boehringer Inghelheim. It started in 2019 and builds upon the results of the previous project: developing a vaccine against the FIVP coronavirus. The approach involves the construction and testing of a novel type of LAV vaccine against coronaviruses. The results are expected at the end of June 2020.
The project “construction of a toolbox of enabling technology for coronavirus vaccine strategies” started in 2016 and was completed after 18 months. Utrecht University and Boehringer Inghelheim joined forces to develop a vaccine against feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV), which is a coronavirus that causes serious illness in cats. Two different approaches were taken to weaken the FIPV vaccine virus. These two approaches resulted in FIPV mutants that were characterised in vitro. Cats were infected with the mutants and the results showed that if cats had one specific mutant, they showed the least signs of disease. This approach will be used in vaccination-challenge experiments in cats.
The project “innovative antibody-based strategies to combat future emergence of zoonotic viral infections” started at the beginning of 2020 and will end in December 2023. Utrecht University, Erasmus Medical Center and Harbour Antibodies are joining forces in this project. The aim is to explore novel approaches for development of broadly reactive antibodies and vaccines for influenza A and coronaviruses. Hopefully, the results will provide novel broad-spectrum intervention concepts and/or solutions, which can be applicable to combat current and potential future life-threatening zoonotic viruses. This project will be soon available on our website.
Top sector LSH intends to invest in the field of COVID-19. If you have a high-end public-private research proposal in the field of COVID-19, we are inviting you to send us an e-mail including 1) a short description of the project, 2) a list of (potential) consortium partners, 3) a rough estimate of the budget, and 4) the expected start-and end date. Please note that any definite projects must comply with the match call regulations.
After receiving your e-mail, we will aim to contact you by cellphone within one working day to discuss the possibilities. Please include your cellphone details in your email. Finally, the email can be sent to: zijlstra@health-holland.com, until the 10th of April 2020.
In 2017, Top Sector LSH and the Association of Dutch Health Foundations (SGF) started with their first joint thematic call on chronic illnesses, known as the “Beter Gezond” call. Joining forces to tackle shared challenges continued with an unrivalled number of thematic calls in 2019, such as Big Data & Health, Organs-on-Chip and Type 2 Diabetes or in collaboration with the Dutch Cancer Society, Netherlands Center for One Health and the Association of Dutch Health Foundations. Below you will find an overview of upcoming thematic calls in 2020!