About us
Preparedness for tomorrow's pathogens
While anthropogenic interference with natural habitats is altering our environment, nature responds by dynamically adapting to a constantly changing world. Rising global temperatures, habitat fragmentation, pollution, urbanization, intensive farming put animals under enormous pressure. This is driving large-scale shifts in animal behavior, ecology, and dispersal. Disease vectors, such as mosquitoes or ticks, are also expanding their ecological ranges, altering microbial equilibria and transforming pathogen distribution and transmission dynamics.
Recent events have demonstrated that arthropod-borne pathogens (arbopathogen) are continuosly introduced in new locations and once they arrive, they spread fast. Just think about West Nile, Zika, or Bluetongue. Several vector-borne disease (VBD) epidemics have started suddenly, with no prior signs that could make us predict what was going to happen. This has tought us that future (maybe yet unknown) emerging arbopathogens may already be silently circulating among wildlife and vectors close to us.
ARBO-WATCH was created to respond to the need for being able to quickly detect novel or unexpected vector-borne pathogens before they become health threats. ARBO-WATCH is an arbopathogen preparedness network born thanks to fundings from the EU -co-finananced 4EU+ European University Alliance, and we are now conducting exploratory investigations to collect preliminary data to atract funding for broader-scope projects.
Our project is built on 4 main pillars:
- across-border collaboration
- standardized methods for easy comparability
- centralized data analysis and streamlined results sharing
- strong scientific drive to explore the unexplored
The network currently comprises 4 funding European Universities in Denamark, Italy, and Poland, but we are looking for new partners to join our discovery endeavour. We are now using metagenomics and broad-spectrum molecular detection methods to identify (novel) viruses in ticks collected globally. Once identified, we perform cross-country epidemiogenetic investigations and phylogenetic modeling to make initial assumptions and plan hypotheses-driving follow-up investigations.
