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

• Health, demographic change and wellbeing;
• Food security, sustainable agriculture and forestry, marine and maritime and inland water research, and the Bioeconomy;
• Secure, clean and efficient energy;
• Smart, green and integrated transport;
• Climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials;
• Europe in a changing world - inclusive, innovative and reflective societies;
• Secure societies - protecting freedom and security of Europe and its citizens.

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

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.