EUGLOHRIA advances towards establishing solid Research and Innovation Networks in Europe

EUGLOHRIA consolidates its progress towards establishing a permanent dialogue between world-class research and innovation (R&I) for Global Health in Europe.

Generating the conditions for proper concerted action between the members of the Alliance in addressing Global Health challenges is at the heart of EUGLOHRIA.

EUGLOHRIA has made significant advances towards stepping up the international and cross-sectoral collaboration in R&I and contributing to the fight against Global Health crises, such as the ongoing COVID-19 Pandemic.

These achievements rely on the convenient identification and pooling of expertise, resources, means, and talents across nations and disciplines, which translates into the development and implementation of collaborative strategies allowing for rapid, concerted, multi-layered and comprehensive responses in dealing with Global Health Challenges.

The Alliance amasses in each of its members an extensive amount of human, technological and scientific resources. Exploiting the immense potential lying within requires identifying it, establishing contact points, logging the data into an inventory, and making it accessible for others to engage in meaningful exchanges. This way, the Alliance creates favourable conditions for proper and sustainable collaborations leading to meeting its objectives and setting in motion an innovative agenda of institutional transformation.

In a first comprehensive approach, the Consortium has jointly identified, inventoried, and bridged researchers, projects, facilities, and institutions within and between its members, in pursuit of its fundamental goal to develop common research agendas and joint action plans to share research infrastructures and resources related to Global Health.

Tackling Global Health Crises: COVID-19 related R&I in the Alliance

Under the coordination of Lund University, EUGLOHRIA has made significant progress in identifying and bridging COVID-19-related research and partners' expertise on pandemics. Aiming to create a dynamic cross-disciplinary "EUGLOH Science and Innovation in Pandemics" - Map, researchers and research projects have been identified and inventoried across the Alliance.

Based on a common inventory form developed and used by all partners, EUGLOHRIA identified 306 pandemics-related projects across the Alliance, involving most faculties and ranging from epidemiology, statistical forecasting, social sciences and law to artificial intelligence, molecular medicine, engineering, physics and more.

This inventory will provide the basis for assessing common research topics and developing shared action plans for joint activities on pandemics research.

Mapping research technologies and infrastructure towards establishing an Excellence Core Facilities Network

Lead by Szeged University, EUGLOHRIA embarked on the inventory and identification of specific facilities and resources to develop an action plan towards sharing research infrastructures in Global Health. These facilities constitute advanced research technologies and infrastructural capabilities housed at each Alliance member aimed at contributing to the basic scientific understanding of processes related to health and disease and the development of medical and other innovations in addressing Global Health issues.

Many core facilities, research platforms and high-expertise research infrastructures are distributed among the members of the EUGLOH Alliance, each with a unique research and infrastructure profile. Exploiting this collaborative potential requires surveying institutional research infrastructures in Global Health and identifying core facilities for shared use.

EUGLOHRIA has jointly engaged in assessing each partner's research infrastructure in the field of Global Health and identifying accessible "Excellence Core Facilities" aiming at consolidating the Alliance's research capacity, fostering scientific collaboration, and creating the expected synergies in R&I.

During this exercise, 719 research platforms have been identified and clustered around 97 Excellence Core Facilities, mainly covering fields in Life Sciences and Health (about 62 %) and Science and Engineering (about 36 %).

This effort constitutes a first step towards establishing a "Network of Excellence Core Facilities" as part of which shared access to core facilities in the network can be implemented, effectively enabling solid scientific collaboration between the members of the Alliance.