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Importance of International R&D Collaboration Between Companies: The CollaborativeHealth Use Case

Abstract:

International R&D activities are strategical to provide solutions that can solve global problems by creating interdisciplinary and multicultural teams. One of the current challenges that international collaboration could solve is related to outbreaks of infectious diseases, which have a devastating impact on society. Influenza in Spain was responsible of 4000 deaths during 2019, despite having a vaccine. Tropical infectious diseases, such as Dengue or Zika, are transmitted through mosquitoes and proliferate in hot and humid conditions. Brazil reported more than 3 million cases and more than a thousand deaths during the dengue fever epidemic that started in 2019. New coronavirus have once again shown the consequences that infectious diseases have both for the society and for the economy, claiming thousands of lives and forcing many countries to take restrictive lockdowns. Preventive measures can mitigate the devastating consequences of outbreaks of infectious diseases. In this sense, infodemiological systems compile data regarding public-health concerns to forecast new outbreaks. In this manuscript we describe the CollaborativeHealth tool and we report three case-studies carried out with this tool: Influenza in Spain, Zika and Dengue in Ecuador, and COVID-2019 in Spanish-speaking countries.