• Canada
• OA Publications Mandate: Yes close
• 2019 close

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 AquaVitae is to increase aquaculture production in and around the Atlantic Ocean in a sustainable way by developing new and emerging low trophic species and by optimising production in existing aquaculture value chains. The value chains that AquaVitae will focus on include macroalgae production, integrated multi-trophic aquaculture, and production of new echinoderm species as well as existing shellfish and finfish species. A series of cross-cutting Work Packages (WPs) will include research on biosensors, Internet of Things (IoT), product characteristics, consumer attitudes, market potential, sustainability, environmental monitoring, risk assessment, analysis of value chains, profitability, and other socioeconomic aspects. AquaVitae will contribute to various policy dialogues and produce briefs on policy and governance issues. The AquaVitae consortium consists of 36 full partners from Europe and countries bordering the Atlantic Ocean, in addition to an Industry Reference group, a Policy Advice Group, and an External Advisory Group. AquaVitae supports extensive communication and outreach activities, employs a multi-actor approach to ensure stakeholder engagement in all phases of the project, and will set up a durable aquaculture industry and research network around the Atlantic Ocean. Industry partners are present in all case studies, and they have a special responsibility for exploitation and commercialization of the project research results and outcomes. AquaVitae will have a lasting impact on society through the introduction of new species, and through the development of new processes and products based on a circular economy / zero waste approach with improved sustainability. AquaVitae will produce Good Practice standards, facilitate industry apprenticeship and student exchange, support extensive training programs for industry, academia, and the public, and contribute to the implementation of the EU-Brazil-South Africa Belém Statement.

Current design methodologies used to characterise ice accretion and its effects on air vehicle components and power plant systems are mainly based on empirical methods, comparative analysis, 2D simulation tools and past experience gained on in-service products. Due to the associated uncertainties, cautious design margins are used, leading to conservative and non-optimised solutions. As future air vehicle and propulsive system architectures introduce radical design changes, it will no longer be possible to rely on the existing design methodologies, making future development extremely difficult to accomplish efficiently and within short development cycles that are demanded by customers and desired by industry. These difficulties are increased by the recent changes in certification regulations, in particular for Supercooled Large Droplets (SLD), which require manufacturers to certify their products against more stringent requirements. Snow also remains a challenge, especially for turbine engines and APUs. ICE GENESIS will provide the European aeronautical industry with a validated new generation of 3D icing engineering tools (numerical simulation tools and upgraded test capabilities), addressing App C, O and snow conditions, for safe, efficient, right first time, and cost effective design and certification of future regional, business and large aircraft, rotorcraft and engines. ICE GENESIS will permit weather hazards to be more precisely evaluated and properly mitigated thanks to adapted design or optimised protection through either active or passive means. Furthermore, ICE GENESIS will pave the way for 3D digital tools to be used in the future as acceptable means of compliance by the regulation authorities. Overall, ICE GENESIS will contribute to flight safety, reduced certification costs and increased operability.

The Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) is considered a game-changer in the field of nuclear energy and a strong asset in the combat against climate change. The expanding R&D programmes in China, EU, Russia, and the USA, lead to a vibrant atmosphere with many bright students entering the scene and new start-up companies eager to commercialize this technology. The MSR typically consists of a reactor core with a liquid fuel salt, and an integrated treatment unit to clean and control the fuel salt composition. Due to the liquid fuel, the MSR excels on safety and can operate as a breeder with thorium or uranium, or as a burner of spent fuel actinides. However, to make these promises reality, R&D is needed to demonstrate the inherent safety of the reactor, the feasibility of the fuel cycle facilities, and the path towards licensing and deployment. This will take time during which the safety requirements will become more stringent. This proposal aims to develop and demonstrate new safety barriers and a more controlled behaviour in severe accidents, based on new simulation models and assessment tools validated with experiments. Our proposal cover the modelling, analysis, and design improvements on: • Prevention and control of reactivity induced accidents • Redistribution of the fuel salt via natural circulation and draining by gravity • Freezing and re-melting of the fuel salt during draining • Temperature control of the salt via decay heat transfer to the environment • Thermo-chemical control of the salt to enhance the radionuclide retention • Nuclide extraction processes, such as helium bubbling, fluorination, and others • Redistribution of the source term in the fuel treatment unit • Assessment and reduction of radionuclide mobility • Barriers against severe accidents, such as fail-safe freeze plugs, emergency drain tanks, and gas hold-up tanks The grand objective is to ensure that the MSR can comply with all expected safety requirements in a few decades from now.

We propose to create the EUropean-CANadian Cancer network (EUCANCan), a federated infrastructure whose mission is to enable Personalized Medicine in Oncology by promoting the generation and sharing of harmonized genomic and phenotypic data. EUCANCan builds on work performed by members of the consortium and related projects to align and interconnect existing European and Canadian infrastructures for the analysis and management of genomic oncology data. The EUCANCan network will be composed of reference nodes in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Heidelberg, Paris and Toronto which have established strong research and clinical programs in the field of genomic oncology. These reference nodes will work together in an interoperable fashion to provide the genomic oncology community with a uniform computing environment for the processing, harmonization and secure sharing of cancer genome and phenome data in the context of clinical research, enabling the discovery of clinically-relevant patterns of variation in the cancer genome such as biomarkers predictive of therapeutic response. The infrastructure will also provide a proving ground for federated genome analysis systems that may one day be integrated into national and regional healthcare systems. EUCANCan’s objectives are: (1) harmonise protocols for the identification and interpretation of germline and somatic variation profiles within cancer genomes; (2) generate strategies for the flow, management, storage and distribution of data within and across EUCANCan nodes; (3) define community standards for data elements, types and formats; (4) develop an open and accessible data portals for the searching and download of EUCANCan data; and (5) define an appropriate ethical and legal frame to ensure the secure sharing of protected individual genomic and phenotypic data across countries.

BEYONDOPPOSITION will be the first large-scale, transnational study to consider the effects of recent Sexual and Gender Rights and Equalities (SGRE) on those who oppose them, by exploring opponents’ experiences of the transformation of everyday spaces. It will work beyond contemporary polarisations, creating new possibilities for social transformation. This cutting-edge research engages with the dramatically altered social and political landscapes in the late 20th and early 21st Century created through the development of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans, and women’s rights. Recent reactionary politics highlight the pressing need to understand the position of those who experience these new social orders as a loss. The backlash to SGRE has coalesced into various resistances that are tangibly different to the classic vilification of homosexuality, or those that are anti-woman. Some who oppose SGRE have found themselves the subject of public critique; in the workplace, their jobs threatened, while at home, engagements with schools can cause family conflicts. This is particularly visible in the case studies of Ireland, UK and Canada because of SGRE. A largescale transnational systematic database will be created using low risk (media and organisational discourses; participant observation at oppositional events) and higher risk (online data collection and interviews) methods. Experimenting with social transformation, OPPSEXRIGHTS will work to build bridges between ‘enemies’, including families and communities, through innovative discussion and arts-based workshops. This ambitious project has the potential to create tangible solutions that tackle contemporary societal issues, which are founded in polarisations that are seemingly insurmountable.

As recognized by the Council Recommendation 2009/C 151/02, rare diseases (RD) are a prime example of a research area that can strongly profit from coordination on a European and international scale. RD research should be improved to overcome fragmentation, leading to efficacious use of data and resources, faster scientific progress and competitiveness, and most importantly to decrease unnecessary hardship and prolonged suffering of RD patients. In the specific context of the massive generation, need for reuse and efficient interpretation of data, introduction of omics into care practice and the structuration of RD care centers in European Reference Networks, it appears crucial and timely to maximize the potential of already funded tools and programmes by supporting them further, scaling up, linking, and most importantly, adapting them to the needs of end-users through implementation tests in real settings. Such a concerted effort is necessary to develop a sustainable ecosystem allowing a virtuous circle between RD care, research and medical innovation. To achieve this goal, the European Joint Programme on RD (EJP RD) has two major objectives: (i) To improve the integration, the efficacy, the production and the social impact of research on RD through the development, demonstration and promotion of Europe/world-wide sharing of research and clinical data, materials, processes, knowledge and know-how; (ii) To implement and further develop an efficient model of financial support for all types of research on RD (fundamental, clinical, epidemiological, social, economic, health service) coupled with accelerated exploitation of research results for benefit of patients. To this end, the EJP RD actions will be organized within four major Pillars assisted by the central coordination: (P1): Funding of research; (P2): Coordinated access to data and services; (P3) Capacity building; (P4): Accelerated translation of research projects and improvement outcomes of clinical studies.

GISCAD-OV involves the whole value chain of the Cadastral domain. It’s main scope is to design, develop and validate an innovative and cost-effective High Accuracy Service (HAS) for Cadastral Surveying applications, based on GPS+Galileo E6 HAS and Precise Point Positioning-Ambiguity Resolution (PPP-AR) quick convergence techniques. The project aims also to set up a GISCAD-OV Service Operator Centre, able to fully integrate the existing Augmentation and National infrastructures for improving Cadastral operations efficiency and effectiveness, reducing Cadastral procedures’ time for the benefit of the citizen. Furthermore, an efficient Cadastral System update process will improve the data reuse interoperability with other applications (Infrastructure Monitoring, post-disaster management). A Europe-wide Pilot Project campaign will be carried out for validating the implemented solution, applying single Countries Cadastral Regulations. GISCAD-OV is based on the following drivers: - Upgrade of commercial GNSS receivers for decoding and applying Galileo E6B corrections and integrating them into the PPP solution - PPP-RTK Multiple Constellation and Multiple Carrier Ambiguity Resolution and instantaneous fixing - Cost effective solutions, through the use of low-cost augmentation services and receivers, paving the way for “Smartphone Surveying” - Development of a Business Model and relevant revenue Mechanisms for a real implementation of a Cadastral HAS Business Plan, involving all relevant Value Chain Stakeholders a direct Commercialization GISCAD-OV targets the exploitation of new business opportunities in the Cadastral land surveying, through the service differentiation introduced by Galileo HAS corrections broadcasting. The current status of the above technologies falls in the area of TRL 6-7 while GISCAD-OV targets a TRL 8: System complete and qualified, including Galileo HAS implementation.

To meet the global and European challenges of reducing the GHG emissions from the construction sector, Build-in-Wood will develop a sustainable and innovative wood value chain for the construction of multi-storey wood buildings. The potential estimated impact from Build-in-Wood is a reduction of GHG emissions of 12.1 MT/year by 2030. Build-in-Wood will, based on experiences from the stakeholders involved in construction of some of the worlds largest wooden multi-storey buildings, take building with wood beyond state of the art. The consortium has identified a strong need for improving the whole value chain and intent to make wood a competitive building material by delivering a fully documented, demonstrated, sustainable and cost effective building system. Build-in-Wood will address this challenge by innovative development of materials and components as well as structural systems and façade elements for multi-storey wood buildings fit for both new construction and retrofitting. Developments will be delivered by means of a dynamic co-created web-based building configurator – the Design Guide – and a complimentary web-based toolbox of documented materials and components. Build-in-Wood will demonstrate full-scale digital case projects for real projects and test system prototypes in operational environments. Active engagement of cities and their building ecosystems through technical and thematic co-creation workshops will strengthen the urban-rural connections. All developed materials, components and system prototypes will be tested, piloted and fully documented for immediate market uptake. Based on developments, recommendations for new or updated European harmonised technical specifications and Eurocodes will be provided. To meet consumer acceptance, regulatory and sustainability requirements, Build-in-Wood includes life-cycle, socio-economic and safety assessments that will guide policy and decision-making at industry and EU level.