GA Number: 101155852

Background:

Recent epidemics have highlighted how infectious disease outbreaks can severely and sometimes uniquely affect the short and longer term health of pregnant women and their infants. Nevertheless, these groups are invariably excluded from pandemic preparedness and response research, as during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objectives:

The overall objective of PIPELINE is to develop a dedicated pregnancy-infant preparedness platform for adaptive trials, to improve pandemic preparedness for these underserved populations.

The specific objectives of PIPELINE are to:

1. establish a multi-country adaptive trials platform that that can support novel diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics for infections in pregnancy and infancy, able to pivot rapidly to emerging health threats; 

2. create and sustain a responsive and “ever-warm” clinical trial network of sites with expertise in recruiting pregnant women and infants and adaptive trial designs; 

3. undertake an adaptive platform trial on respiratory syncytial virus immunisation in pregnant women and infants, to test the platform’s capabilities and address a public health priority for the EU; 

4. evaluate novel sampling techniques and immunity approaches with relevance for preparedness; and 

5. embed all activities within sustained dissemination, exploitation and communication with key stakeholders to translate results

UNIVR activities:

UNIVR is partner in WP1 (Preparedness platform implementation), WP2 (Preparedness platform sustainability) and WP9 (DEC - Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication – Development).