As coordinators of the three EU-funded Zika consortia, we are excited to share some of our activities, publications and meetings since our last joint newsletter.
Each project continues to enrol pregnant women and children in clinical studies. Together, the three consortia have worked to streamline and harmonize their ethics procedures in all of their research activities, with ZIKAlliance sharing their standard operating procedures (SOPs) in this area and ZIKAction taking the lead in drafting shared SOPs. A working group with representatives from each consortium is also working to draft a joint statistical analysis plan and others are working on the guiding principles necessary for sharing data across projects. The REDe network has begun trainings, workshops and other activities in collaboration with partners in Latin America and the Caribbean. REDe ran a quality management webinar with partners and PIs across the ZIKAlliance Consortium, and is now launching a Knowledge Gap Analysis to determine the key gaps in clinical research capacity. Furthermore, all three consortia are pushing ahead their innovative research on arboviruses and their vectors and hosts, both in laboratory based and field studies.
In terms of research outputs, scientific collaboration between ZikaPLAN and ZIKAlliance has recently resulted in an article published in Emerging Infectious Diseases. The authors of this study developed novel multiplex real-time reverse transcription PCRs. The new PCRs enable yellow fever (YFV) detection with diagnostic sensitivity: this single-target assay may be advantageous in resource-limited settings and may be more convenient for multiplex usage in combination with assays targeting co-circulating arboviruses, such as chikungunya, Zika, and dengue viruses. This study is a practical example of the common mission to contribute to the creation of a sustainable network for flavivirus response in Latin America.
We have also had a busy schedule of meetings, including our first Joint Scientific Advisory Board, Executive Committee and Ethics Advisory Committee, which you can read about here. ZIKAction and ZIKAlliance held their annual meetings in the past few months (see here and here), and ZikaPLAN held it in Cuba (see here). ZIKAlliance is hosting a scientific congress on Zika in Marseille, 4-6 June 2018, in collaboration with the European Society for Virology (ESV), ZikaPLAN and ZIKAction. The event will cover all forms of scientific research on Zika: from basic to clinical research, epidemiology, environmental studies and social sciences. The congress will receive as a priority the scientists of the three Zika consortia. To this end, speakers from the three consortia will be invited to participate in plenary sessions and a space will be dedicated to posters exhibition. The congress will both provide a synthetic view of the state of the art and allow the presentation of the latest research results obtained by the three consortia. The conference will be followed by the Joint Executive Board meeting of the three consortia, in order to discuss the joint analysis plan and complex ethics issues. On 8 June 2018, following the end of the congress, the three EU-funded consortia, as well as other Zika research teams, will meet for the second GloPID-R Zika Research meeting in Marseille.
Prof. Annelies Wilder-Smith, ZikaPLAN Scientific Coordinator
Prof. Carlo Giaquinto, ZIKAction Scientific Coordinator
Prof. Xavier de Lamballerie, ZIKAlliance Scientific Coordinator
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No.s 734548, 734584, 734857
Cross Consortia Collaboration
REDe Webinar: How to plan and deliver quality assured data clinical research study, November 2017 All studies on human subjects should have an assured level of quality to protect the rights of the participants and to ensure data are reliable. It is the aim of the Consortia, with the help of REDe, to assure that quality standardised data is collected through all studies. Following on from the meeting in Havana, Cuba, in August 2017 where REDe Co-ordinator, Nina Jamieson launched the ‘REDe scheme for assuring data quality and introduced reciprocal monitoring’, a live training webinar was conducted on ‘Data quality management using the ZIKAlliance 'Pregnant Women Cohort Study' as a working example’ by Professor Trudie Lang. Read More
Consortia wide exercise to agree core curriculum for observational, laboratory and clinical trials In the next few months, the REDe team will be contacting the Work Package Leads to understand the current status of clinical, laboratory and health research projects and training that is being undertaken by health workers as part of their work packages under the three EU funded consortium of ZIKAction, ZIKAlliance and ZikaPLAN as part of it's Knowledge Gap Analysis. Read More
