A major contribution to eradicating Ebola has been made by the EU-funded EVIDENT project. It has confirmed that the Ebola virus has mutated at a lower rate than feared during the recent outbreak in West Africa. This means that the new diagnostic methods, treatments
and vaccines under development should still be effective in the fight to eradicate the disease.
Working with a budget of €1.7 million from the EU's research funding programme Horizon 2020, the EVIDENT project mapped the genetic evolution of the Ebola virus. Its results will be published today in Nature.
The EVIDENT project is the research part of the EU-funded European Mobile Laboratory (EMLab), which was the first rapid response diagnostics unit deployed to the outbreak epicentre in
Guinea.
Both EVIDENT and EMLab projects are coordinated by Professor Stephan Günther from the Bernard Nocht Institute, Germany. The EVIDENT project brought together a team of experts from
eleven institutions in France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.
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