Call: Validation of biological toxins measurements after an incident: Development of tools and procedures for quality control

1. Excellent Science
2. Industrial Leadership
3. Societal Challenges

The primary aims of the Secure Societies Challenge are:

• to enhance the resilience of our society against natural and man-made disasters, ranging from the development of new crisis management tools to communication interoperability, and to develop novel solutions for the protection of critical infrastructure;
• to fight crime and terrorism ranging from new forensic tools to protection against explosives;
• to improve border security, ranging from improved maritime border protection to supply chain security and to support the Union's external security policies including through conflict prevention and peace building;
• and to provide enhanced cyber-security, ranging from secure information sharing to new assurance models.

Securing the society against disasters is one of the central elements of the functioning of any society. There is barely any societal sector which is not to some extent concerned by disasters and related resilience and security issues. Fighting crime and terrorism requires new technologies and capabilities for fighting and preventing crime (including cyber-crime), illegal trafficking and terrorism (including cyber-terrorism), including understanding and tackling terrorist ideas and beliefs to also avoid aviation-related threats. The protection of the European borders requires the development of systems, equipment, tools, processes, and methods for rapid identification. This includes supply chain security in the context of the EU’s customs policy.

On Digital Security, this Challenge focuses on increasing the security of current applications, services and infrastructures by integrating state-of-the-art security solutions or processes, supporting the creation of lead markets & market incentives in Europe, following an end-user driven approach, including for instance law enforcement agencies, first responders, operators of critical infrastructures, ICT service providers, ICT manufacturers, market operators and citizens.

This Challenge should bring together all security stakeholders: industry - including SMEs, research organisations, universities, as well as public authorities, non-governmental organisations and public and private organisations in the security domain. The active involvement of end-users is of high importance.

The Secure Societies Challenge will contribute to the implementation of the policy goals of the Europe 2020 strategy, the Security Industrial Policy, the Internal Security Strategy and the Cyber Security Strategy.

The objective of this call is to reduce the loss of human life, environmental, economic and material damage from natural and man-made disasters, including from extreme weather events, crime and terrorism threats.

Under this call proposals are invited against the following topics:

• Integrated tools for response planning and scenario building
• Situational awareness systems to support civil protection preparation and operational decision making
• Validation of biological toxins measurements after an incident: Development of tools and procedures for quality control
• Broadband communication systems
• Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN)
• Developing a comprehensive approach to violent radicalization in the EU from early understanding to improving protection
• Human Factor for the Prevention, Investigation, and Mitigation of criminal and terrorist acts
• Forensics techniques on: a) trace qualification, and b) broadened use of DNA
• Toolkits integrating tools and techniques for forensic laboratories
• Integration of detection capabilities and data fusion with utility providers’ networks
• Detection techniques on explosives: Countering an explosive threat, across the timeline of a plot
• Technologies for prevention, investigation, and mitigation in the context of fight against crime and terrorism
• Next generation of information systems to support EU external policies
• Towards reducing the cost of technologies in land border security applications
• Risk-based screening at border crossing
• Through-foliage detection, including in the outermost regions of the EU
• Architectures and organizations, big data and data analytics for customs risk management of the international goods supply chain trade movements
• Acceptance of "no gate crossing point solutions"
• Data fusion for maritime security applications
• Border Security: autonomous systems and control systems
• Pan European Networks of practitioners and other actors in the field of security

Recent incidents in Europe and worldwide recalled that biological toxins can be produced by laypersons or acquired illegally and intentionally released in a criminal act to harm people. While different technologies are available for toxin detection and analysis, recent findings have shown that the comparability of analytical results from different laboratories is poor, which cast severe doubts about the validation of current methods and about the overall validity of analytical data. This means that in case of a bioterrorist act using compounds such as e.g. ricin (or others such as abrin), saxitoxin, botulinum, neurotoxins, enterotoxins, etc. there is no guarantee that decisions to react are made based on data meeting basic quality requirements. The lack of quality assurance/quality control tools (e.g. certified reference materials of ricin, botulinum, etc.) and standard operating procedures hampers the validation and the EU-wide comparability of biological toxin measurement data. There is therefore a need to develop an EU-wide approach for enhancing validating analytical capacities for biological toxin measurements in case of bioterrorism threats, similarly to what exists regarding chemical threats.

At least three legal entities. Each of the three must be established in a different EU Member State or Horizon 2020 associated country. All three legal entities must be independent of each other.

Link to the National Contact Point Finder.