MUMBAI: In a first of its kind joint initiative in the field of medical research, the European Union (EU) and India have come together to combat dengue, one of the major virus-induced diseases of recent years affecting millions across continents. Although there is still no specific therapeutic medicine, a vaccine has been developed and approved for use in certain parts of the world, but no licensed or approved dengue vaccines are available in India, a high-incidence country.Led by Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, the project involves researchers from eight European universities, five Indian institutions, a university from the US, and an NGO from Guatemala, all working in the field of public healthcare and medical research.The total project cost is estimated to be around Rs 90 crore. The EU has already sanctioned Euro 8 million (nearly Rs 81 crore). The balance will be funded by the Govt of India through the Dept of Biotechnology, Ujjwal Neogi, the coordinator for the project, also a senior lecturer at Karolinska Institute, told TOI.The EU partners are collaborating with several leading institutes in India that include Artemis Hospital and Max Hospital in New Delhi, Kasturba Medical College Hospital in Mangalore, Regional Centre for Biotechnology, Faridabad. The India part is being led by National Institute of Biomedical Genomics, Kalyani in West Bengal. “We’re bringing together the brightest minds from Europe and India to understand the disease at a molecular level and design better tools for diagnosis and prevention,” Neogi from Karolinska Institute said.Stockholm-based Karolinska Institute is a 215-year-old world-leading medical research university that every year selects the Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine.The project has a dual objective. Primarily, it aims at better understanding the complete lifecycle of dengue infection: From the origin of the virus, to how it spreads in human beings to how it affects the human body. And then to come out with solutions so that the spread of this mosquito-induced disease could be contained, its impacts on human beings could be predicted during the early onset of the disease, and could be cured more effectively and quickly than now.With an estimated 100 million infections annually across 144 countries leading to over 10,000 deaths, this predominantly tropical disease is now spreading in Europe, mainly due to climate change, the project’s website noted.Another equally important objective of the project is to better understand how, in general, virus-induced pandemics spread and to prepare a blueprint for countering such incidents in future. The secondary objective of the project grew in importance in the backdrop of the Covid-induced global pandemic, researchers working in the project told TOI.From India’s side, the partners will make “original research contributions to the overall objectives of the program, that is pioneering innovative antiviral strategies to alleviate the burden of dengue infection while deepening our understanding of its complex pathogenesis through cutting-edge multi-modal technologies,” said Arindam Maitra, Professor, National Institute of Biomedical Genomics. Maitra is the chief coordinator for the researchers in India involved in this project.“The Indian team will collect, clinically characterize, undertake viral and host multiomics investigations to identify key factors facilitating severe disease and undertake research to come up with antiviral and immunomodulatory therapeutic strategies (that can regulate body’s immune response) in collaboration with the EU team.” The ‘multiomics investigations’ here refer to an integrated data analysis of various DNA and RNA molecules within a dengue-infected person to identify novel biomarkers and improve disease classification.According to Neogi, among various cutting-edge research techniques, the project will use the brain-on-chip process. This is a relatively new research technique that simulates a human brain’s functions under a controlled environment in a laboratory. The researchers would be using the brain-on-chip process to see what happens to a human brain when the dengue virus infects the body. They expect the same technique could also give them some idea about combating the virus that is spread through mosquitoes. The technology will be transferred to India from the EU partners.About the primary takeaways for India from this project, Maitra said that given the increasing occurrence of severe disease and death following dengue virus infection in India and other parts of the globe, “this research initiative is expected to provide information and solutions which have the potential to play a major role in combating this challenge.”