GLOPID-R

GloPID-R member

Netherlands Organisation for Health research and Development (ZonMw)

About ZonMw

It is ZonMw’s goal to ensure that healthy people stay that way for as long as possible, that people who are ill recover as quickly and completely as possible and that those who require care and nursing receive the highest standard of services. To achieve this, we need to focus on prevention, to stop people from becoming ill, and we need good health care for those who nevertheless fall ill.

ZonMw funds health research in the Netherlands and promotes the practical application of the knowledge that this research produces. While mainly focused on research projects within the country, it also has an international focus through its participation in various European initiatives, including Joint Programming Initiatives (JPIs), ERA-NETs, and the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). ZonMw also participates in Heads of International Research Organisations (HIROs) to discuss important, international health care themes.

In her own words

“The silent pandemic of antimicrobial resistance is a serious public health threat. Our national and international projects have led to valuable insights, policy changes, and guidelines on this topic. By participating in international networks like GloPID-R and JPIAMR, we are in close contact with other funding organisations that bring together researchers from all over the world with the common aim of curbing antimicrobial resistance and combatting infectious diseases.”

Anouk Warmerdam, ZonMw AMR Programme

Our Work

Nationally, ZonMw runs a large programme to combat COVID-19. The programme has three key objectives:

  • Contributing to the control of the coronavirus pandemic and preventing or reducing the negative effects of the measures taken to combat it
  • Generating new knowledge about the control of epidemics and pandemics
  • Generating knowledge about the (global) societal dynamics during and after this pandemic and other comparable drastic health crises, and the measures taken against them.

The programme has three focus areas:

  • Predictive diagnostics and treatment and vaccination
  • Care and prevention, including transmission
  • Societal dynamics

In the meantime we have funded around 150 large and 150 smaller projects, in different subjects depending on the phase of the pandemic. Many of the larger projects are still running in 2022. Currently, we are developing a programme on pandemic preparedness.

ZonMw also runs a programme on infectious disease control, including non-alimentary zoonoses. Emerging infectious disease research is an important part of this programme. The programme currently funds around 40 large research projects, including projects on HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis C, STIs, pneumonia, vaccine preventable diseases, infection control, arboviruses, Lyme disease, campylobacter, rabies, Zika, tick-borne diseases, psittacosis and clostridium difficile.

In addition, ZonMw runs a national research programme on antibacterial resistance (ABR) and is a partner in the Joint Programming Initiative on Antimicrobial Resistance (JPIAMR) Strategic Research Agenda, which also collaborates with GloPID-R. ZonMw finances many national projects studying ABR such as alternative ways to reduce antibiotic use in animals and human-animal ABR transmission.

ZonMw manages separate programmes for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and other aspects of infectious diseases. The aim of these programmes is to cover the entire spectrum of research from science to policy, with a One Health approach.

ZonMw has invested in various projects to improve the reusability of resources that are generated in COVID-19 projects (i.e., databases, biobanks, recordings, software, protocols, etc.), guided by FAIR principles:

  • Contribution to VODAN, the Viral Outbreak Data Access Network. One of the deliverables is a semantic data model based on the case report form (CRF) following WHO standards. The VODAN-in-a-box toolset makes it possible, for example, to install software to capture data, and to interoperate with other related datasets.
  • Webinars, support and community building to involve data stewards (and researchers) in FAIRifying data (and other resources).
  • M4M (Metadata for machines) workshops to establish community specific metadata templates. Using these templates, the description of datasets (and other resources) can de standardised, including specific COVID-19 features. The resulting metadata from each project are machine readable, and therefore ready for artificial intelligence. The templates were made available to the entire research community in spring 2021.
  • The metadata will also be presented in a national health data portal, thereby making research outputs findable, and allowing data requests. It is also possible to answer research questions at a metadata level.

Within GloPID-R, we are an active member of the Data-sharing Working Group. We focus on FAIR data and M4M (Metadata for Machines) and collaborate on the continuing development of the UKCDR-GloPID-R COVID-19 Research Project Tracker.

ZonMw is member of several JPI’s/ERANET (e.g. JPI AMR), and of at least 6 new European partnerships, such as the partnership on pandemic preparedness, and the partnership on OneHealth/AMR.

In addition, we have other bilateral partnerships, for example with Belgium and Canada (CIHR).

Did you know?

ZonMw:

  • Is located in the Hague and has 464 employees
  • Distributed €354 million to projects in 2021
  • Has international contacts in 40 countries

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The GloPID-R Secretariat is a project which receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101094188.