• Canada
• 2013-2022close
• 2022 close
• OA Publications Mandate: Yes close

Nanomedicine is the application of nanotechnology to medicine and healthcare. The field takes advantage of the physical, chemical and biological properties of materials at the nanometer scale to be used for a better understanding of the biological mechanisms of diseases at the molecular level, leading to new targets for earlier and more precise diagnostics and therapeutics. Nanomedicine, rated among the six most promising Key Enabling Technologies, is one of the most important emerging areas of health research expected to contribute to one of the strategic challenges that Europe has to face in the future: Provide effective and affordable health care and assure the wellbeing of an increasingly aged population. EuroNanoMed III (ENM III) builds on the foundations of ENM I & II, which launched 7 successful joint calls for proposals since 2009, funded 51 transnational research projects involving 269 partners from 25 countries/regions, and allocated € 45,5 million to research projects from ENM funding agencies. ENM III consortium, reinforced with 12 new partners from Europe, Canada and Taiwan, is committed to fostering the competiveness of European nanomedicine actors taking into account recent changes in the landscape and new stakeholders and challenges, as identified in the SRIA in nanomedicine. The first joint call for proposals will be co-funded by ENM III partners and the EC. After the co-funded call, three additional joint transnational calls will be organized and strategic activities will be accomplished in collaboration with key initiatives in the field. ENM III actions focus on translatability of project results to clinical and industry needs.

ERA-HDHL is a proposal of ERA-NET Cofund in the field of nutrition and health to support the Joint Programme Initiative Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life (JPI HDHL). Nowadays, there is a high burden of non-communicable diseases due to unhealthy diet and lifestyle patterns. The 24 members of the JPI HDHL are working together to develop means to (1) motivate people to adopt healthier lifestyles including dietary choices and physical activity, (2) develop and produce healthy, high-quality, safe and sustainable foods and (3) prevent diet-related diseases. Between 2012 and 2015, JPI HDHL had implemented 7 JFAs with 40 M€ funds from national funding. The JPI HDHL is now set for further enhancement in tight coordination with the EC through the ERA-NET Cofund instrument. ERA-HDHL will provide a robust platform for implementing joint funding actions (JFAs) that address the needs identified in the JPI HDHL strategic research agenda and strengthen the research funding activities of JPI HDHL. An EC cofunded call on the identification and validation of biomarkers in nutrition and health will be implemented. For this foreseen action, the member countries of the JPI HDHL have doubled their financial commitment comparing to previous JFA implemented on a similar topic. Moreover, ERA-HDHL will launch at least 3 additional JFAs in line to fulfil the JPI HDHL objectives.

The proposed Coordination and Support Action (CSA) has the overall objective to establish an international network of experts and stakeholders in the field of microbiome food system research, elaborating microbiomes from various environments such as terrestrial, plant, aquatic, food and human/animal and assess their applicability and impact on the food system. MICROBIOMESUPPORT will follow the approach of food system and integrate actors and experts from all stages in this circular economy of food. The food system approach is part of the FOOD 2030 concept to promote a systems approach to research and innovation (R&I). MICROBIOMESUPPORT will be one of the key drivers to implement FOOD 2030 strategies, will facilitate multi-actor engagement to align, structure and boost R&I in microbiome and will support the European Commission by coordinating the activities, meetings, workshops and results from the International Bioeconomy Forum (IBF) working group ‘Food Systems Microbiome’. The main concept behind MICROBIOMESUPPORT IS to boost the bioeconomy and the FOOD 2030 strategy, by focusing on the new avenues generated by microbiome R&I efforts. MICROBIOMESUPPORT WILL have a main impact on the coordination of commonly defined R&I agendas which will be incorporated into regional, national, European but also global funding programmes related to microbiomes in food systems. MICROBIOMESUPPORT will create a collaborative international network and integrate know-how in plant, terrestrial, animal, human and aquatic microbiome R&I as well as expertise in bioeconomy applications. MICROBIOMESUPPORT has integrated international partners form Brazil, Canada, South Africa, China, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand, India and USA in order to improve the international cooperation and coordination of common bioeconomy research programmes and set a basis for common microbiome R&I agendas.

We are proposing a new and innovative precision approach to the identification of severe infections and sepsis in children. This data-driven approach to diagnosis will overcome many of the limitations of current expert opinion-based triage guidelines. Smart technology has the potential to overcome the barrier of limited clinical expertise in the identification of the child at risk. This mobile health platform, with sensors and data-driven applications, will provide real-time individualised risk prediction to facilitate timely and effective targeted treatment at first contact, regardless of location. This low-cost technology will provide rapid triage in remote areas globally where specialists are not regularly available. We will trigger rapid, highly effective and low-cost interventions such as antibiotics, fluid, oxygen therapy and other special investigations to children determined to be most at risk of sepsis, based on data-driven prediction. Thus, these innovations will improve timely access to life-saving treatments for children in the poorest countries where deaths from infection and sepsis are common. Children in poor families or in populations marginalized by health and social inequities are especially vulnerable to infections. In these children, infection is a major contributor to disability and years of life lost and has a great economic and social cost. Sepsis is the leading cause of death and disability in children, every hour of delay in treatment is associated with greater organ damage and ultimately death. The challenges, especially in poor countries, are the delays in diagnosis and the inability to identify children in urgent need of treatment. To circumvent these challenges, we propose the implementation and evaluation of a trigger tool that will reduce the time to diagnosis and prompt the timely initiation of life-saving treatment. The key innovations are 1) a data-driven approach to rapid diagnosis of sepsis severity and 2) a low-cost digital tagging system to track the time to treatment. The tool will require minimal cost, clinical expertise and training or time to use. The tool will identify high risk children and reduce time to treatment. Our mobile platform (mobile device and dashboard) will create a low-cost, highly scalable solution for children with sepsis.

EnTimeMent aims at a radical change in scientific research and enabling technologies for human movement qualitative analysis, entrainment and prediction, based on a novel neuro-cognitive approach of the multiple, mutually interactive time scales characterizing human behaviour. Our approach will afford the development of computational models for the automated detection, measurement, and prediction of movement qualities from behavioural signals, based on multi-layer parallel processes at non-linearly stratified temporal dimensions, and will radically transform technology for human movement analysis. EnTimeMent new innovative scientifically-grounded and time-adaptive technologies operate at multiple time scales in a multi-layered approach: motion capture and movement analysis systems will be endowed with a completely novel functionality, achieving a novel generation of time-aware multisensory motion perception and prediction systems. The proposed model and technologies will be iteratively tested and refined, by designing and performing controlled and ecological experiments, ranging from action prediction in a controlled laboratory setting, to prediction in dyadic and small group interaction. EnTimeMent scenarios include health (healing and support of everyday life of persons with chronic pain and disability), performing arts (e.g. dance), sports, and entertainment group activities, with and without living architectures. EnTimeMent will create and support community-building and exploitation with concrete initiatives, including a community of users and stakeholders, innovation hubs and SME incubators, as premises for the consolidation beyond the end of the project in a broader range of market areas.

HIV-1 is responsible for a global pandemic of 35 million people, and continues to spread at a rate of >2 million new infections/year. It is widely acknowledged that a protective vaccine would be the most effective means to reduce HIV-1 spread and ultimately eliminate the pandemic, while a therapeutic vaccine may help mitigate the clinical course of disease and lead to strategies of viral eradication. However despite 30 years of research, we do not have a vaccine capable of protecting from HIV-1 infection or impacting on disease progression. This in part represents the challenge of identifying immunogens and vaccine modalities with reduced risk of failure in late stage development. To overcome this bottleneck some of the most competitive research groups in vaccine discovery from European public institutions and biotechs from 9 EU countries together with top Australian and Canadian groups and US collaborators, have agreed to join forces in EAVI, providing a pool of international expertise at the highest level. EAVI2020 will provide a platform for the discovery and selection of several new, diverse and novel preventive and/or therapeutic vaccine candidates for HIV/AIDS. Emphasis will be placed on early rapid, iterative, small Experimental medicine (EM) human vaccine studies to select and refine the best immunogens, adjuvants, vectors, homologous and heterologous prime–boost schedules, and determine the impact of host factors such as gender and genetics. Animal models will be used to complement human studies, and to select novel immunization technologies to be advanced to the clinic. To shift the “risk curve” in product development we will develop innovative risk prediction methods, specifically designed to reduce the risk associated with late stage preventive or therapeutic vaccine failure, increasing the chance of discovery of an effective vaccine.

HEMERA will integrate a large Starting Community in the field of tropospheric and stratospheric balloon-borne research, in order to make existing balloon facilities available to all scientific teams in the EU. The project involves major space agencies dealing with balloon infrastructures, companies operating the balloons, companies providing the necessary technology and scientific experts. Balloon borne instruments are suitable for a wide range of science fields, such as atmospheric measurements, climate and environment related investigations, astronomy and astrophysics, space instruments validation and testing of new technologies. The objectives of HEMERA are to: - Provide better and coordinated balloon access to the troposphere and stratosphere for scientific and technological research - Attract new users to enlarge the community accessing the balloon infrastructure - Enlarge the fields of the science and technology research conducted with balloons - Improve the balloon service offered to scientific and technical users - Favour standardisation, synergy, complementarities and industrialisation through joint The infrastructure deals with a wide range of mission characteristics including altitude, flight duration, instrument mass and volume. Flights can be performed during all seasons at various latitudes, satisfying various scientific needs. Currently, the HEMERA programme will use the Zero Pressure Balloons for stratospheric flights (relevant for measuring Essential Climate Variables and for astrophysics), additional types of balloons can be considered. HEMERA will give access to launch bases and is thus capable of conducting scientific balloon campaigns, in Europe and abroad, necessary in particular for scientific issues in the context of climate change. HEMERA includes 3 major components : - Operational activities to organize and conduct the flights - Development of innovative technologies and infrastructure to optimize the balloon offer - Networking

The accumulation of fluid in the lungs is a significant feature of the pathology in patients with severe Covid-19 infection. This build up of fluid, contributes to difficulty in breathing and in some cases death. This fluid in the lungs results in part from direct damage to cilia and mucus cells and resulting debris and in part due to plasma extravasation triggered by the immune response to infection and associated damage. Imatinib, a generic marketed drug has been shown to reduce plasma extravasation following inflammatory challenge in animal models and this effect is supported by anecdotal observations in the clinic. This project proposes to rapidly implement a multi-center, randomized, open label, double-blind, Phase IIb study to evaluate the efficacy, safety and pharmacokinetics of imatinib mesilate in patients with corona-virus associated pneumonitis. 100 patients entering ICU with a diagnosis of corona-virus associated pneumonitis will be randomised, half receiving i.v. imatinob , 200mg bid for 5 days and one half placebo. Adverse events, immunological parameters and imatinib pharmacokineticswill be monitored. Outcome measures Primary: PaO2/FiO2 ratio. Secondary: rate of intubation/need for mechanical ventilation, pulmonary edema on high resolution CT, Oxygenation Index, respiratory mechanics, duration of mechanical ventilation, fluid balance, ICU length of stay, mortality. This project has already received EMA scientific advice for the treatment of acute respirator y distress syndrome and has granted orphan drug status.

Background: Many cutting-edge therapies rely on manipulating the adaptive immune system, which has evolved a vast diversity (repertoire) of immune receptors to recognize and remove pathogens and cancer cells. The sequence-data sets characterizing this Adaptive Immune Receptor Repertoire (i.e., AIRR-seq data) have the potential to revolutionize vaccine research and the development of therapies against autoimmune diseases and cancer; however, AIRR-seq data are typically stored and curated by individual labs, using a variety of tools and technologies. Sharing these data in a common way across disease studies, labs, and institutions around the world will improve our ability to recognize patterns in basic research and clinical trials, and increase our confidence in these patterns. The existing iReceptor Platform uses community-developed standards to facilitate sharing of AIRR-seq data by enabling queries across a system of distributed data repositories. Project: The iReceptor Plus consortium of researchers from Europe and Canada will address several key challenges to optimally sharing AIRR-seq data among public and industrial partners: protecting patient privacy and the intellectual property of partners, performing complex analyses on data brought together from many sources, and expanding the size and number of repositories that can be integrated in the network. Impact: The iReceptor Plus project will facilitate sharing of AIRR-seq data among multiple institutions, including biopharmaceutical companies and researchers working with human confidential data, across multiple diseases, treatments and populations. This will lead to a better understanding of the causes of infectious and autoimmune diseases and cancer, which can lead to early detection and suggest novel therapies. These improvements will reduce the social and economic burden of these diseases, advance Europe and Canada’s leadership role in immunotherapy, and contribute to improved patient care worldwide

The overall objective of INTAROS is to develop an integrated Arctic Observation System (iAOS) by extending, improving and unifying existing systems in the different regions of the Arctic. INTAROS will have a strong multidisciplinary focus, with tools for integration of data from atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and terrestrial sciences, provided by institutions in Europe, North America and Asia. Satellite earth observation data plays an increasingly important role in such observing systems, because the amount of EO data for observing the global climate and environment grows year by year. In situ observing systems are much more limited due to logistical constraints and cost limitations. The sparseness of in situ data is therefore the largest gap in the overall observing system. INTAROS will assess strengths and weaknesses of existing observing systems and contribute with innovative solutions to fill some of the critical gaps in the in situ observing network. INTAROS will develop a platform, iAOS, to search for and access data from distributed databases. The evolution into a sustainable Arctic observing system requires coordination, mobilization and cooperation between the existing European and international infrastructures (in-situ and remote including space-based), the modeling communities and relevant stakeholder groups. INTAROS will include development of community-based observing systems, where local knowledge is merged with scientific data. An integrated Arctic Observation System will enable better-informed decisions and better-documented processes within key sectors (e.g. local communities, shipping, tourism, fisheries), in order to strengthen the societal and economic role of the Arctic region and support the EU strategy for the Arctic and related maritime and environmental policies.