RESCEU: REspiratory Synctial virus Consortium in EUrope, 2019-2022

Duration: Nov 2019 - Mar 2022

Inducement
Human Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) causes severe disease in the very young, elderly and in high risk groups. Is is estimated that RSV was associated with 34 million cases of acute lower respiratory tract infection (ALRI), 3.4 million ALRI hospitalisations and 55,000 to 199,000 deaths in children <5 years in 2005.

Objectives
RESCEU’s vision is to integrate and exploit existing knowledge and data to provide greater insights into the impact of RSV on health systems and societies throughout Europe, and to actively engage stakeholders in order to improve strategic planning and decision-making. It also seeks to access existing clinically annotated biological specimens from prospective studies and to supplement this with bespoke clinical studies to create a powerful new bio-repository for future research.
To conduct systematic reviews and assemble unpublished data to inform RSV epidemiology, disease burden (including sequelae) and resulting economic burden.

Specific objectives
- To develop a sustainable data platform to quantify healthcare and economic impact of RSV (all ages and key risk groups) including sequelae at regional and national levels.
- To report available RSV surveillance data from Europe; and in consultation with WHO/ECDC define best practice and standard operating procedures (SOPs) for RSV surveillance in Europe.
- To estimate overall and risk group specific direct and indirect costs to health care systems, patients / child caregivers and society in the short, medium and long term to provide estimates of RSV attributable economic burden and potential cost-effectiveness of RSV vaccines.
- To establish an effective Good Clinical Practice (GCP) study network for prospective studies including development of SOPs
- To conduct GCP multi-centre prospective studies to establish the incidence of RSV disease and document resource utilisation by severity in healthy infants, high-risk infants, older adults (aged >60 years) and adults (aged ≥40 years) with COPD; and establish burden of longer-term disease sequelae.
- To establish a biobank for identifying potential bio markers of RSV disease severity for further validation.
- To establish an ethics/governance framework that will allow broad stakeholder engagement including with national and international public health agencies, the pharmaceutical industry and regulators.
- To provide high-quality, sustainable, robust data collection systems that link closely with public health/regulatory bodies/health care providers for informing policy and regulatory processes.
- To promote the dissemination of knowledge to a wide range of stakeholders, raise awareness, foster connectivity and promote informed action.

Project website RESCUE: https://resc-eu.org/

Deliverables
RESCEU public deliverables are presented on https://resc-eu.org/project/deliverables/
Output of the project (papers and publications are presented on https://resc-eu.org/publications/resceu-publications/