Virus infections are among the primary causes of death in both humans and animals, causing considerable suffering and economic losses worldwide. Acute respiratory viral infections, acute enteric viral infections, chronic hepatitis B, C and E infections and HIV infections together constitute the majority, in terms of disease burden, of infectious diseases in the Netherlands and beyond.
These viral infections continue to cause a significant burden on public health and society. Consequently there is a large unmet medical need for effective and safe diagnostic, prophylactic, prognostic and therapeutic strategies and tools to reduce the burden of the aforementioned infectious diseases. The intervention methods that are currently available are only effective to a limited extent.
The years 2010 and 2011 marked the formation of the successor of the VIRGO Consortium that was established in 2004 as one of the four innovative clusters of NGI. The renewed VIRGO Consortium builds forward on the research platform created by VIRGO and is still partially funded by NGI, but is now embedded in the “Viral Infections” research line of the DRUGS cluster of the Dutch Life Sciences Health sector FES grant. In its second term, the VIRGO Consortium expands its field of research from acute viral respiratory infections to major acute and chronic viral infections, aimed at the rational design of novel and/or improved intervention strategies against the four major viral infectious diseases mentioned above.
In addition, VIRGO includes pioneering research on neurological disorders with suspected viral origin. The central goal of the joint research activities in VIRGO is to generate an improved understanding of the virus-host interactions at molecular level. Detailed molecular knowledge about virus-host interactions will enable the rational design of optimal efficacious and safe intervention strategies as well as novel antiviral drugs, vaccines and diagnostics.
The VIRGO Consortium has expanded from fourteen partners to nineteen partners, of which seven academic institutions, three research organisations and nine private sector companies. The result is a strategic public-private partnership that brings together expertise in (molecular) virology, neurology, immunology, genetics, transcriptomics, proteomics, bioinformatics and metabolomics.
The VIRGO Consortium has two main public funding sources: NGI and FES. The VIRGO Consortium is a coherent research & development platform and the NGI-part forms a subset of the activities, budget, timeline and partners within this project.
In essence, the FES-part expands the NGI-part of the VIRGO research into acute enteric viral infections, neurological disorders with suspected viral origin, metabolomics and a wider set of clinical and experimental samples from acute respiratory viral infections, chronic hepatitis B and C infections and HIV infections and associated research activities and outputs.
Additional information
VIRGO Consortium factsheet
Website
www.virgo.nl