Our capacity to predict areas at risk of emergence of infectious animal diseases (ID) and to minimize pathogen spreading is directly linked to our understanding of population dynamics of pathogens within and outside hosts, including interactions within and between hosts and within a community of hosts. These relationships are complexified by global changes (mobility intensification, land-use, and climate changes), which highly influence contacts among hosts and vectors’ distribution. Therefore, there is a crucial need to produce knowledge regarding population dynamics of pathogens. This relies on three main issues, which are: (i) identify mechanisms and drivers promoting an increase in virulence, transmissibility and host-shift, (ii) well understand the impact of host factors as a key parameter of pathogen evolution and dynamics, in particular those provided by vaccination or pre-existing immunity or by host genetics, and (iii) identify transmission routes, including the role of vectors and of the environment in dissemination and transmission to highlight areas at risk of emergence and spread. Addressing these issues is essential for ID management, in providing stakeholders and policy makers with strategies and methods for surveillance, prevention and control of IDs (breaking the route of transmission, detection, inactivation of pathogens…) within the context of global changes. Within the frame of the Research Innovation Action HORIZON-CL6-2022-FARM2FORK-02-03 call, WiLiMan-ID intends to tackle these issues using IDs that each represent both a threat and a model for studying the ecology of infectious animal diseases, thanks to the diversity of transmission pathways and hosts and putative vectors involved. The communities of hosts considered vary depending on the disease and include humans, domestic animals (poultry, horses and pigs) and wildlife (wild birds, wild boars and cervids). The selected IDs are avian influenza, caused by avian influenza virus; African horse sickness caused by African horse sickness virus, fatal neuronal disease caused by West Nile virus (that will be studied together with the Usutu virus as a co-infecting agent); African swine fever caused by African swine fever virus; and chronic wasting disease caused by an atypical pathogen belonging to the prion-like family. The two main innovative aspects of WiLiMan-ID are (i) the integration of fine-grained features of pathogens and host behaviour with large scale observations across different compartments of the ecosystem to gain an integrated vision of ID (re-)emergence, persistence and spread, and (ii) the study of contrasted patho-ecosystems in order to gain a more complete view of their intertwinement. This will help us gain relevant knowledge and develop methods to anticipate and face future, mostly unknown, infectious health threats with better proficiency. Overall, WiLiMan-ID aims at (i) improving the capacity for risk-based surveillance thanks to a better understanding of sources and pathways of emergence and spread of animal IDs, (ii) enhancing the capacity to prevent and control IDs in animals, and their potential impact in human populations, and (iii) improving our understanding of the impact of climate change on pathogen ecology and animal IDs to predict and possibly anticipate with appropriate countermeasures. To tackle this challenge and reach the expected outcomes of the call, the consortium will bring together a strong group of academic and non-academic (private companies, stakeholders…) partners with the wide range of expertise needed to intregrate the multiple levels of complexity (pathogen, host, communities of hosts, territory) of WiLiMan-ID and to interlink complementary disciplines. WiLiMan-ID will be embeded within Prezode and will thus benefit from the network developed by this initiative.

Prions are lethal proteinaceous pathogens with major public-health risks due to their zoonotic and iatrogenic potential. They are composed of aggregated, misfolded conformers of the host-encoded prion protein that progressively deposit in the brain by a self-perpetuating reaction. The underlying molecular mechanisms of replication and tissue dissemination remain mostly elusive. Our objective is to model these processes entirely based on recent advances that prion aggregates are conformationally heterogeneous and dynamic rather than uniform and static. To achieve this, we will map in prion-infected brain the structural diversification-to-bioactivity/neurotoxicity landscape of prion assemblies in a spatiotemporal manner and mathematically build a multiscale model of diversification and lesion spreading. The goal is to generate an open access model capable of predicting the disease progression and identify key elementary process for therapeutics intervention and early diagnostics.

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is a prion disease that affects wild and farmed cervids. CWD is a highly contagious: over the last 15 years the disease has spread across the whole United States of America and Canada. The CWD epidemics reached a stage where it now threatens the long term survival of cervid populations. Beside the ecological disaster it represents, major concerns exist with regard to the risk that CWD prions might represent for human (zoonosis) and other animal species (propagation in farmed ruminants) During three decades Europe was considered to be free of CWD. However, CWD cases have now been identified in three European countries. The goals of this project are: • to provide the necessary elements for an in depth assessment of the public health risks that are associated with the emergence of CWD prions in Europe. • to identify allele that would be associated with genetic resistance/ susceptibility to the disease in the cervid populations.