We know that outbreaks like coronavirus will become more common in the future and tackling them is the Apollo programme of our time, according to Professor Marion Koopmans.
‘Tackling these diseases is an Apollo programme for our time in terms of the effort, technology and scale of what is required. If we can bring the detection process forward so we can spot outbreaks coming, we can move very fast against them, track them and develop vaccines to keep them under control,’ tells Koopmans in a interview with Horizon, the EU Research & Innovation Magazine.
Koopmans is head of the viroscience department at Erasmus University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, a member of the European Commission’s recently established advisory panel on Covid-19 and is coordinator of the VEO project, which is developing techniques to spot new infectious diseases as they emerge and to track them when they do. Much of what they have learned already is being used in the global fight against the new coronavirus pandemic.
Read the interview in Horizon, april 2020.