EVA-GLOBAL gathers 38 academic institutions at the forefront of human, animal and plant research in Virology, associated with key Non-Governmental Organisations including the World Health Organisation, OIE, FAO and related international organisations such as the CGIAR. This new project is built on the strong foundations constituted two previous EVA (2009-2014), FP7 and EVAg (2014-2019), H2020 projects. It includes high calibre institutes with the appropriate expertise to collect, characterise, standardise, authenticate and distribute human, animal and plant viruses.

EVA-GLOBAL is conceived to be an open-access entity aiming at developing synergies and complementary capabilities in such a way to offer improved access to the researchers. A single-entry point, the web-based catalogue, facilitates access to the collections including viruses, derived materials and engineered cells.

EVA-GLOBAL will integrate 13 facilities dedicated to the high-risk pathogens manipulations (BSL4), which constitutes the largest BSL4 network worldwide. EVA-GLOBAL will also link up with other network-based virus associated programmes that exist globally. This unique advanced community aims at becoming the most responsive network to improve the control of emerging or re-emerging virus outbreaks at the global level. During the past EVAg project, this infrastructure has already been able to play a key role for the control of emerging virus diseases by the supply of unique reagents for the detection of viruses under the WHO umbrella. Through this new ambitious four-year project and the new institutes joining the consortium, EVA-GLOBAL will become the largest virtual virus collection for human, animal and plant viruses will move beyond the current state-of-the-art to provide an increasingly valuable resource and service to the scientific community, including government health departments, higher education institutes, industry and to the general public as well. 

RIVM colleagues George Haringhuizen and Chantal Reusken are involved in the project. 

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871029