Launched today: new project, COMECT (COordinating MEchanism for Cohorts and Trials) aims to encourage synergy and reduce overlap between cohorts and trials across Europe.
COMECT is an EU-Funded Coordination and Support Action (CSA), designed to link-up multiple existing European coordination initiatives to encourage synergy and reduce overlap. The structure of this project foresees two of these existing initiatives, the Trial Coordination Board (TCB) and the Cohort Coordination Board (CCB), linked alongside the new Outbreak Response Board (ORB) to form a Coordination Board, running alongside the Joint Access and Advisory Mechanism (JAAM). The TCB, which started in June 2022, aims to facilitate the successful implementation and development of European COVID-19 adaptive platform trials (APT) through ensuring collaboration and cooperation between these APTs, and maintaining a constructive dialogue with regulatory bodies, policy makers and global COVID-19 trials.
The TCB, which is divided into two pillars: the therapeutic pillar and the vaccine pillar, includes coordinators and principal investigators from multiple EU-Funded APTs, representatives from the European Commission (DGs RTD, SANTE, HERA) and the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA), industry partners and policy makers such as the WHO and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
The CCB, formed in April 2022, provides a forum to encourage knowledge-sharing between EU-funded COVID-19 cohort-based research projects, to spark partnerships, and to discuss similar challenges and reduce overlap between projects. The CCB includes European Commission representatives, all the EU-funded projects conducting COVID-19 cohort-based research and other relevant initiatives such as the European COVID-19 Data Platform, industry partners, EU agencies (EMA, ECDC, HaDEA) and other stakeholders (e.g., EFPIA).
The JAAM is composed of a panel of seven renowned experts that are fully independent from the EU-funded APTs. The panel reviews requests from investigators or industry looking to test their compound in one or more of the therapeutic European COVID-19 APTs and recently expanded to include other respiratory syndromes.
Within this project, the ID-CARE team at the University of Verona will continue the management of the CCB as it has since the beginning, acting as secretariat for the meetings, drafting key reports and supporting the visibility of EU cohort research on the global stage.
The University of Verona will chair the Working Group (WG) on Exploration which focusses on project objective 3 To develop and maintain an overview of relevant APTs and CSs, and facilitate engagement with external stakeholder networks and organisations. Central to this working group is the development and maintenance of an up-to-date Central Data Repository (CDR) of APT and Cohort Studies (CS). The continuous mapping of this WG will facilitate the participation of the relevant projects to the TCB and CCB, information flow to the European Commission, facilitate bilateral exchange between networks and relevant initiatives and bring these initiatives to the agenda of the Coordination Board.
Find out more about this project here: https://www.id-care.net/projects/comect
COMECT (COordinating MEchanism for Cohorts and Trials)
Grant Agreement number: 101136531.