STAR-IDAZ IRC State-of-the-art Report, September 2021

The annual ‘State-of the-art Report’ is now published and is available on this web-site (under Reports, IRC, here ). The report provides STAR-IDAZ IRC members, and other animal health stakeholders, with a global overview of existing initiatives to speed up research, and boost collaboration in the sector. It also provides an overview of the latest discoveries on priority animal health diseases.  The report will support the decisions of policy makers and research funders, to accelerate coordinated development of animal disease control methods at the international level.

The first two Chapters target initiatives to speed up research and development (R&D), to facilitate transnational R&D collaborations, and recent infrastructures and databases to facilitate R&D. The third Chapter reports on recent research developments on IRC priority diseases. For each disease, information is provided on existing global research coordination networks, and on gaps in the knowledge derived from the DISCONTOOLS database.

For the priority diseases/issues, a selection of promising innovations or major research outcomes published in 2021 identified from CAB Abstracts database are reported to show, whenever possible, main statistics topics such as diagnostics, epidemiology, vaccination/vaccine development and therapeutics. A graphical analysis of the estimated distribution of articles, based on country of first author, among the four STAR-IDAZ Regional Networks (Americas, Africa and Middle East, Asia and Australasia, and Europe), is reported. This has been supplemented with information on current research initiatives on the priority diseases and issues, collected from experts and research funders during STAR-IDAZ IRC Executive Committee, Scientific Committee, and Regional Networks meetings and roadmap workshops, giving a unique insight into state of research on these topics.