CoofHea – Cooperation for Health

The Covid-19 pandemic is undoubtedly an obvious threat to public health that requires a huge commitment by the Italian, Greek and international scientific community aimed at a deeper knowledge of both the molecular mechanisms that cause the pathological condition and the evolutionary characteristics of the virus genome pathogen SARS-CoV-2. The COVID-19 outbreak has affected Member States in a sudden and dramatic manner and will have implications, specifically on the Greece Italy Programme territory. In Puglia, at the end of July 2020, there were over than 4,500 cases of COVID-19 (1,14‰ of the total population). According to the official data, 551 people have died for COVID-19 causes in Puglia. The profile of the sick people has an average age of 56 years out of which 51,2% are of male gender. In Greece, in the same period, there are 4,401 cases 20 died people for COVID-19 causes. With these data, it is clear the involvement of all the eligible area. Until today we are living a great impact of the COVID-19 and it is necessary to have a common approach in order to try to solve or to mitigate the problem. The COOFHEA project, indeed, will operate with three approaches: A. supporting Puglia Region and the Hospitals in the Greek eligible area to purchase the personal protective equipment and/or medical equipment (ventilators, beds, monitors, etc.); B. supporting scientific research that will use a set of methods based on different types of approaches, to identify possible molecular mechanisms that can be exploited for the development of innovative and more efficient therapies; C. sharing with the Greek hospitals the Puglia platform of telemedicine/clinical remote assistance. This is an innovative system with lets the monitoring of patients forced to quarantine for Covid-19 in their home, in order to avoid the hospitals costs, thanks to the ""H-Casa"" clinical remote assistance platform and to give a possibility of ""normal life"" to the population affected but not in a very serious way . With this differentiated approach it will be possible to give organic answers to a complex problem like COVID-19. AS we described before the project will provide a systematic approached to the requests of the territories. The combination of the three actions, purchasing of the the equipment, the research and the clinical remote assistance will give not only an answer to the territories but also will create a real and concrete network for the health in the Programming area between Puglia Region and the Greek Hospitals. We should underline also that in Italy the Regions have the institutional competences in order to organize the health system and to purchase the equipment. In Greece these competences are directly from the Ministry and the hospitals. For this reason in this project we choose Puglia Region as LB and the Greek Hospitals as PPs in order to give a real impact on the territories         Output 1 - purchased the medical equipment the hospitals of the Programme Area Output 2 – To build a strong and permanent network in the health system that can face the future challenges and the health emergency with a common approach Output 3 - To sharing experiencesfor the health home care and the italian H-Casa platform useful for the clinical remote assistance Output 4 – To realize a specific study which will contribute to: A. Identify the viral subtypes prevalent in the regions of Puglia and Epirus; B. To check for an eventual presence of SARS-Cov-2 subtypes associated with clinical manifestations of the disease with varying severity; C. To check whether / how the different level of pathogenicity is partly explained by an ability to modulate the host's gene expression; D. To identify genetic variants and haplotypes associated with a different response to the infection in relation to the patient's sex; E. To generate important -omics and clinical databases that will help to identify human genetic variants that determine the severity of the disease, thereby providing the means to differentiate the individuals who are genetically susceptible to the virus from those who are inherently protected; F. Virus-affected genes of the patients can be potential targets for new antiviral drugs as well as biomarkers of risk assessment for infected individuals.   The implementation of the proposed project will have significant results on the cross-border area. The proposed project will promote awareness, research and update of ICT applied to healthcare innovation. The cross-border health network will be established in oder to provide a wide range of innovative support activities with huge benefits for the Programme Area. The health network will become a point of reference for the health activities and actions in Greece and Italy. The research activities will have a strong impact in the scientific research because the integration of the various ""-omic"