CoVICIS Newsletter April 2025

Reflecting on CoVICIS…

As the CoVICIS consortium winds up, we’re pleased to share that we have together achieved all its objectives. The cross-border partnerships cultivated through CoVICIS have conducted high quality research across the board, enabling learning and insights across a range of interrelated areas, including:

Identifying emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs) through genomic surveillance in different patient cohorts;

Deciphering risk and protective factors to infection in different risk, gender, and age groups;

Evaluating the impact of VOCs on the effectiveness of vaccine-induced humoral and cellular responses in different populations and regions of the EU and Sub-Saharan Africa

Elucidating immune correlates of protection against VOCs; and
Generating evidence to inform future vaccination strategies and the design of next generation vaccines.

Annual general meeting – Madrid, Spain (27-28 March 2025)

As thirty participants from CoVICIS partners gathered – in person and virtually – at the beautiful and historic Royal Academy of Pharmacy (RANF) in Madrid, they shared the latest data and reviewed the unique value of their collaboration over the past three years.

Giuseppe Pantaleo, Professor of Medicine at CHUV, explained how the project’s combined state-of-the-art virologic and immunologic platforms with large genomic surveillance studies and diverse cohorts contributed a range of public health outcomes. These included informing national surveillance on the emergence and evolution of SARS-CoV-2; delineating effectiveness of vaccine-induced immune response in immune-compromised populations; and identifying vaccine-induced immune responses and infections, and breakthrough infections in health care workers and communities in Ethiopia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa and Switzerland from November 2021 until April 2025. He congratulated partners for having achieved everything that the consortium hoped to achieve.

COVID COHORTS POLICY INSIGHT SERIES

This resource summarises key policy insights from EU-funded COVID cohort consortia, informed by a CoVICIS-led policy project conducted between March 2024 through March 2025, following 2.5 years of CoVICIS-supported research.

The European Union’s rapid investment in projects like CoVICIS and others within the Cohort Coordination Board (CCB) network was invaluable. It enabled a quick, comprehensive research response to the pandemic; supported collaboration and networking among EU-funded COVID-19 research projects for data triangulation; and enabled access to valid evidence about how to reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the early critical years. The COVID Cohorts Policy Insight Series shows how COVID cohort studies helped inform the pandemic response and highlights key recommendations to inform the role of cohort studies in responding to future pandemic threats. Key findings include:

PPPR requires investment in large, multidisciplinary, international research networks.

PPPR requires international regulatory harmonization, including sharing data and equipment.

Developing and ensuring equitable access to vaccines is imperative.

Governments must campaign to address vaccine hesitancy.

Research needs better focus on children and adolescents.
The conditions of people with long-COVID and immune compromised people require more focused research.

All the findings are available in the COVID Cohorts Policy Insight Series White Paper and in additional detail in the full Technical Synthesis Report.

BLOG POST – CoVICIS in context: Intercontinental partnership with Esayas Gabedu & Arne Kroidl

In February 2025, Professor Esayas Kebede Gudina, MD, PhD, Professor of Medicine at Jimma University in Ethiopia, and Dr. Arne Kroidl, MD, unit head for HIV and co-infections at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, shared their views on the research they conducted under CoVICIS. Read this final CoVICIS in Context blog post to learn from Professor Gudina and Dr. Kroidl on how having multisectoral, multi-country partnerships has been vital to understanding the transmission dynamics of SARS-COV-2 and the epidemiology of COVID-19 among healthcare workers, community members, and individuals living with HIV.

For a European tropical institute, it is very important to link with African partners. CoVICIS has provided a profound way of partnering with our Ethiopian colleagues, not only because of COVID-19 but also as an approach to pandemic preparedness and dealing with other infectious diseases that occur…This partnership helped us better frame and strategize our research. It helped us strengthen the research infrastructure, from financial management to scientific networking, and helped a lot also to engage in further international research on infectious diseases.

Dr. Arne Kroidl, MD

Unit Head, HIV and co-infections, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany

Key publications

CoVICIS consortium members have contributed to a range of publications, conference proceedings, and communications over the last three years, discussing important findings from studies co-funded by CoVICIS.

Visit the CoVICIS Publications page to find all the articles.

CoVICIS online materials

Don’t forget to check out our online materials on the CoVICIS website to help communicate about the consortium with external stakeholders. Head over to Resources to explore the Policy Insight Series, find a handy one-pager for a quick overview of the consortium, and download a set of graphics that can be used in presentations or shared on social media.