One more year for ECRAID-Base!

The European Union (EU) Horizon 2020 ECRAID-Base project has been formally extended for an additional 12 months, until the end of February 2027. ECRAID-Base started in March 2021 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and was intended to last for five years. However, in the changing landscape of European epidemiology and research perspectives, including also the establishment of the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA), this project has been extended considering its great potential as a source of patient-, region-, and country-level data while developing and coordinating research in response to future health emergencies in the EU.

Since its launch as part of the European Clinical Research Alliance for Infectious Diseases (Ecraid), ECRAID-Base’s mission has been the creation of a Europe-wide sustainable network for harmonised large-scale clinical research studies on infectious diseases. ECRAID-Base encompasses perpetual observational studies on complicated urinary tract infections (POS-cUTI), ventilator-associated pneumonia (POS-VAP), acute respiratory infections in primary care (POS-ARI-PC) and emergency room (POS-ARI-ER), and unexplained febrile diseases with unusual epidemiology and/or clinical presentation (POS-Disease-X). Moreover, the project includes an adaptive-platform trial on community-acquired pneumonia (REMAP-CAP), as well as a laboratory network (LAB-Net), a team working on data management and analysis, a working group focussing on emergency preparedness, and additional training and communication teams.

Within the consortium of 19 partners representing nine countries—Belgium, Croatia, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom—the Infectious Diseases research team at the University of Verona (UNIVR), led by Prof. Evelina Tacconelli, contributes in two Work Packages (WPs).  In WP9, in partnership with the University of Tübingen (Germany), the UNIVR team is a pillar of the Epidemiology Network (EPI-Net), a working group that aims at building a central data repository for European country-level data on healthcare-associated infections, antimicrobial resistance, and outbreak reports. In WP3, the team supports their University Hospital which is one of the most active recruiting centres for the POS-cUTI study, with more than 280 patients successfully enrolled since 2023, and acts as Coordinator for patient recruitment in Italian centres.

In this additional year, the UNIVR team will continue with its regular data collection activity from European surveillance systems and journal publications, as well as with the local recruitment of patients for the POS-cUTI study. Furthermore, a mapping of the surveillance of viral infections across Europe will be performed, to fully understand the degree of preparedness of different healthcare systems against potential pandemics from emerging viruses (e.g., arboviruses). Finally, the impact of cUTIs, in terms of disability and economic consequences will be estimated starting from the data collected in 47 centres from 16 countries in Europe. These activities will contribute to generating robust evidence that policymakers can use to inform evidence-based decisions in addressing antimicrobial resistance and infectious diseases.

Find out more about ECRAID-Base here.