Asphalion is the regulatory partner for a successfully funded Horizon 2020 project entitled VASCOVID, one of the new research projects selected to receive EU funding for research against COVID-19.
With a budget of 2,4 million euros the project VASCOVID aims to develop a portable, non-invasive and real-time health monitoring platform for the evaluation of microvascular health in COVID-19 patients that are in intensive care units. VASCOVID will improve the commercial technology that has been used on the HEMOCOVID-19 project, its sister project, and for such, its objective is to provide unique, more accurate and comprehensive biomarkers for prognostic purposes to guide clinicians in the development and deployment of new therapies targeting the microvasculature and for personalizing patient management in monitoring rescue ventilator strategies to prevent further unexpected deterioration of their respiratory status.
This platform combines two bio-photonics technologies: time-resolved near-infrared spectroscopy (TR-NIRS) and diffuse correlation spectroscopy (DCS), and is the fruit of long-term collaboration between core project partners in two European projects (BabyLux and LUCA) where high technology readiness level has been achieved for neuro-monitoring and thyroid cancer screening. The platform is easy to deploy, cost-effective and provides real-time fast results and its trasition to clinical practice will be eased through this project by pushing CE certification.
The project, coordinated by ICFO and led by ICREA Professor at ICFO, Prof. Dr. Turgut Durduran, will be carried out in collaboration with six other institutions from Spain, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands. This inter-disciplinary consortium is well-suited for these activities and will interact closely with our ongoing clinical study spanning four countries and a dozen hospitals.
This 2-year project has been granted under the H2020 call: SC1-PHE-CORONAVIRUS-2020-2B – Medical technologies, Digital tools and Artificial Intelligence (AI) analytics to improve surveillance and care at high Technology Readiness Levels (TRL)
As for the call, the 23 selected projects involve 347 research groups from 40 countries. This EU funding will allow researchers to address the pandemic and its aftermath, strengthen industrial capacity to manufacture and deploy readily available solutions, develop medical technologies and digital tools, improve understanding of socioeconomic impacts and behaviours during the pandemic, and learn as much as possible about the disease from large data bases of patient groups across Europe.
More details about the project: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101016087
Asphalion is proud to participate in the consortium and is looking forward to begin this challenging collaboration with all partners.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101016087
