CO-CREATE aims to reduce childhood obesity and its co-morbidities by working with adolescents, to create, inform and disseminate obesity-preventive evidence-based policies. The project applies a systems approach to provide a better understanding of how factors associated with obesity interact at various levels. The project focus on adolescence as the specific target group, a crucial age with increasing autonomy and the next generation of adults, parents and policymakers, and thus important agents for change. CO-CREATE involve and empower adolescents and youth organizations to foster a participatory process of identifying and formulating relevant policies, deliberating such options with other private and public actors, promoting relevant policy agenda and tools and strategies for implementation. CO-CREATE strengthen interdisciplinary research and have an inclusive multi-actor approach with involvement of academics, policy makers, civil society, relevant industry and market actors to ensure long-lasting implementation of the results. The project reflects and builds on a number of existing initiatives and platforms, including the extensive research activity from consortium members. The project has a strong gender profile and consider the relevance of geographic, socio-economic, behaviour and cultural factors. CO-CREATE engages international partners from different policy-contexts in Europe, Australia, South Africa and the US. Applying large-scale datasets, policy monitoring tools, novel analytical approaches and youth involvement will provide new efficient strategies, tools and programmes for promoting sustainable and healthy dietary behaviours and lifestyles. The generated knowledge and innovative tools for assessing actual policy implementation, strategies for empowering adolescents; and strategies for identifying, implementing and monitoring relevant policy programmes are applicable to stakeholders involved in the European efforts to tackle childhood obesity.

Today’s major challenge is to improve efficacy of vaccines to protect the growing ageing population against infectious diseases (ID). The VITAL project aims to address this challenge by assessing the ID burden and mechanisms of immunosenescence to provide evidence-based knowledge on vaccination strategies to establish healthy ageing. Links with existing projects containing data sources combined with novel data acquired through our extensive network of data registries across Europe will result in a database of epidemiology, risk factors and burden of disease of both vaccine-preventable (VP) and potential vaccine-preventable ID. Crucial knowledge on factors that hamper immune responsiveness and in-depth analyses of immune compartments involved in inducing effective immune responses to different vaccines in the ageing host will be gathered. We will identify novel predictive, potentially universal immune profiles of vaccine responses using novel technologies, unique experimental models and (infection) cohorts of elderly subjects in which (bio)markers of frailty have already been identified. Novel strategies to address the problem of immunosenescence will be tested, in particular whether vaccination of middle-aged individuals can maintain proper memory immune responses in the elderly, to improve memory immunity before reaching old age. Using data on epidemiology of VPID and immune responsiveness, novel agent-based models will be developed to build a user- friendly tool to be used by health care professionals for optimal implementation of vaccination strategies for older people and to develop dissemination protocols for the obtained knowledge for the healthcare field. Finally, we will deliver a framework that forms the basis for designing, implementing and regularly updating vaccination schemes for the ageing population. Thereby, VITAL will initiate an important impetus to a more targeted immunization program for the elderly in Europe that will enhance healthy aging.