INSTITUTO DE MEDICINA TROPICAL PEDRO KOURI

Their core work

The Instituto Pedro Kouri (IPK) is Cuba's national reference center for tropical and infectious diseases, with decades of operational experience managing arboviruses — dengue, Zika, chikungunya — in a Caribbean island setting. In H2020, they contributed epidemiological surveillance data, clinical case expertise, and regional coordination capacity to the international Zika emergency response that erupted in 2015-2016. Their value to global health consortia lies in direct access to endemic disease populations and a functional public health system that has managed large-scale epidemic responses under resource constraints. They bring ground-truth Latin American data that European research centers cannot easily replicate.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both projects started in 2016 in direct response to the WHO-declared Zika Public Health Emergency of International Concern, so there is no meaningful temporal shift to track — IPK entered H2020 as a specialist recruited for a specific crisis. The early keyword data contains a data artifact (a timestamp rather than a thematic term), while the ZikaPLAN keywords reveal the fuller scope: not just outbreak response but building lasting Latin American research infrastructure around neurological complications and preparedness. If there is any evolution, it is from reactive emergency participation toward a more structured regional network role.

IPK's EU engagement appears driven by the 2016 Zika crisis rather than a sustained H2020 strategy — future collaboration opportunities would most likely arise around the next emerging tropical or arboviral disease emergency, or through Latin American health network projects.

How they like to work

IPK joins exclusively as a participant and has never led an EU project, consistent with a specialist role where European partners seek their endemic-disease expertise rather than their project management capacity. Despite only two projects, they accumulated 75 distinct consortium partners across 23 countries, which reflects participation in two very large global health alliances rather than bilateral partnerships. This tells potential partners they are comfortable operating in complex, multi-stakeholder international settings but should not be expected to take a coordination role.

From just two projects, IPK connected with 75 unique partners across 23 countries — an unusually wide network for such a small funding footprint, which reflects the global scale of the Zika consortia they joined. Their network spans Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean, with a natural geographic anchor in Cuba and the wider PAHO region.

What sets them apart

IPK offers something structurally rare in European research consortia: a fully operational national tropical medicine institute based in a Caribbean country with decades of documented experience managing epidemic-scale arboviral outbreaks. Cuba's centralized public health system means IPK can mobilize surveillance data and clinical samples from across the entire island, which is epidemiologically valuable in ways that fragmented health systems in other Latin American countries cannot match. For any consortium studying vector-borne diseases, emerging tropical threats, or Latin American public health systems, IPK provides regional legitimacy and data access that no European partner can substitute.

Highlights from their portfolio

• ZikaPLAN
  The higher-funded of the two projects (EUR 94,500), ZikaPLAN focused on building durable Latin American research infrastructure — not just responding to the crisis but institutionalizing preparedness — making it the more strategically significant of IPK's EU engagements.
• ZIKAlliance
  A true global alliance for Zika control spanning multiple continents, ZIKAlliance positioned IPK within one of the largest emergency health research consortia mobilized under H2020, connecting them to 75 partners across 23 countries.