Euretos joins multiple COVID-19 consortia

In support of the efforts to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, Euretos has joined multiple public-private consortia and collaborations, contributing access and support to the Euretos AI Platform which integrates over 275 life sciences databases and millions of publications. Over the course of the coming months, Euretos expects to join additional consortia which are currently being considered for government funding.

IThe first collaboration focuses on predicting and preventing serious COVID-19 symptoms. The consortium is led by the Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research (LACDR) a strategic partner of Euretos, and includes researchers, clinicians and intensive care specialists from the academic hospitals involved in the Dutch response to COVID-19. The aim is to accelerate the identification of existing therapies to treat the complex symptoms caused by the Sars-CoV-2 virus. To test the effect of potential treatments, the scientists use artificial patient-derived organs (organs-on-a-chip) from Mimetas. Because tens to a hundred mini-organs fit on a single chip, scientists can quickly perform multiple in-vivo tests. Euretos contribute it's expertise to integrate the new experimental data with available public knowledge about COVID-19. 

Thomas Hankemeier from the LACDR on how the public knowledge in Euretos is being applied: 'Based on all public knowledge, we have developed ideas with other researchers on how you can probably treat patients in the different stages of the disease. We will evaluate the resulting hypotheses with a team of experts and test potentially successful interventions on the organs-on-a-chip.'

A second consortium is the Virus Outbreak Data Network (VODAN) which is a world-wide collaboration of over 130 organisations and described in the following Nature publication. The aim of VODAN is to design and rapidly build a truly international and interoperable, distributed data network infrastructure that supports evidence-based responses to the viral outbreak. VODAN has a longer-term goal to reuse the resulting data and service infrastructure, also for future outbreaks. Euretos will analyse the Real World Data coming from VODAN against the prior knowledge it has integrated from over 275 life sciences databases and millions of publications.

A third consortium consists of 3 universities, 3 public research institutions and 3 companies (including Euretos). Members include the Human Vaccines Project and Roche. The goal of the consortium is to help clinicians, the scientific community and policy makers to get near real time accurate, expert-annotated and specific information on COVID-19. Information will be annotated by domain experts. Outcomes will be visualized in the way stakeholders prefer. The benefits will include better use of treatments, faster development of vaccines and a clearer view on factors that may negatively affect the outcomes of a COVID-19 infection and other future virus outbreaks. The consortium is currently being reviewed for government funding.