Europe supports eight Catalan projects to face Covid-19

A portable device to monitor and classify coronavirus patients according to their severity, through a system of analysis of their micro blood vessels with infrared light, is one of the research projects that the European Commission has selected to respond to Covid-19 and its effects.

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Vascovid, coordinated by the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) and directed by Professor Turgut Durduran, is designed to support intensive care units (ICU) of hospitals. European funding will allow researchers to face the pandemic by developing new medical technologies such as that of ICFO.

The European Commission will dedicate 128 million euros to 23 research projects, and eight of them have the participation of Catalan entities such as the Catalan Institute of Health (ICS), the Agency for Health Quality and Assessment of Catalonia or ISGlobal. In total, 344 research teams from thirty-nine different countries participate, among which there are thirty-two participants from fifteen countries outside the European Union.

The selected initiatives will have to serve to strengthen industrial capacity to manufacture equipment ---such as respirators---; prevent and treat the coronavirus; improve understanding of the pandemic's impact on society, and learn as much as possible about the disease from large databases of European patients.

The Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, Mariya Gabriel, emphasizes that this research is "essential" to better address this pandemic and those that may come in the future. "From a faster reaction capacity to prevent contagion to better diagnoses and treatments or better mitigation measures that take into account behavioral, social and economic aspects, including gender-related issues," she explains.

Initiatives with Catalan participation

The European initiatives with Catalan participation deal with very diverse topics related to the coronavirus. For example, the project in which the ICS is involved, Envision, develops a digital tool for real-time surveillance of Covid-19 patients and intelligent decision-making in ICUs, while Covirna, with the support of the Institut de Recerca de l'Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau, is working on a diagnostic test to improve patient care.

But there are also projects that study questions such as what the pan-European response to the impacts of the Covid-19 crisis and future pandemics and epidemics should be ---Periscope, with the Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya--- or what are the best treatment options and vaccines through the study of different groups of European citizens and the impact they can have on society as a whole ---Orchestra, with ISGlobal---.