The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a global need for accelerating research, improving surveillance, and efficiently developing countermeasures against pathogens with epidemic and pandemic potential. LEAPS aims to demonstrate the value and feasibility of a pro-active policy-supporting strategy for genomic surveillance and for pandemic preparedness and response, by delivering a system-wide stakeholder-validated proof of concept, validated in 4 EU countries, of a learning and adaptive European pandemic preparedness system against pathogen X. LEAPS will fill the gaps observed by global, EU (HERA) and national stakeholders in pandemic response by demonstrating the feasibility of combining genomic One Health surveillance, with genomic epidemiologic modeling for detailed pathogen understanding and precise public health intervention design. LEAPS formalizes dynamic health emergency threat assessment linked to the initiation of governance mechanisms to enable timely decisions in crucial, early stages of an outbreak. LEAPS will develop protocols and models for accelerated medical countermeasure development, availability and accessibility. Based on resulting highly effective intervention strategies, timely countermeasure access and governance mechanisms, model-based policy support is proposed to health authorities for effective, implementable, stakeholder co-created epidemic response scenarios against pathogen X. Scenarios are evaluated on health, socio-economic, and sustainability impact. LEAPS brings together a unique multidisciplinary team with optimal complementary expertise and experience. LEAPS will interact regularly with medical and scientific communities, HERA and health authorities in order to disseminate relevant and accessible information, and during non-emergency periods LEAPS will validate a roadmap for large-scale implementation of LEAPS methodology by EU level, and national authorities and stakeholders in an ecosystem of interlinked actors.

Europe is facing unprecedented challenges, such as the health, migration, economic, climate, energy, and political crises, leading to a sharp increase in emergency public spending and relaxation of due diligence checks. This has resulted in a rise in corruption and fraudulent activities, which have significant negative impacts on the European economy, society, environment, and democracy. Despite emerging technology’s potential to become a powerful tool in the fight against corruption and fraud, the public sector has been slow to adopt digitalization, resulting in data NOT being shared, harmonized, or properly analysed, making evidence-based decision-making almost impossible. Governments are slowly adopting new approaches to ensure a more data-driven, transparent, and accountable public governance, but several fundamental data-related issues remain unresolved. With a team of 9 excellent research institutions and universities, 12 technology, business, and standards, developing companies, 7 public end users, and 3 domain-relevant, industry-exposed NGOs, CEDAR will: (1) Identify, collect, fuse, harmonise, and protect complex data sources to generate and share 10+ high-quality, high-value datasets relevant for a more transparent and accountable public governance in Europe. (2) Develop interoperable and secure connectors and APIs to utilise and enrich 6+ Common European Data Spaces. (3) Develop innovative and scalable technologies for effective big data management and Machine Learning (ML) operations. (4) Deliver robust big data analytics and ML to facilitate human-centric and evidence-based decision-making in public administration. (4) Validate the new datasets and technologies (TRL5) in the context of fighting corruption, thus aligning with the EU strategic priorities: digitalisation, economy, democracy. (5) Actively promote results across Europe to ensure their adoption and longevity, and to generate positive, direct, tangible, and immediate impacts.

The U2Demo project aims to create innovative, consumer-centered management strategies that facilitate widespread participation in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) trading and Energy Sharing. This initiative will promote equitable and democratic access to sustainable energy resources. The collaboration brings together twenty partners, including associated partners, from eight countries, pooling their expertise to develop strategies that will be seamlessly integrated into open-source, non-proprietary tools and platform. These solutions align with principles of openness, technology neutrality, interoperability, scalability, replicability, reliability, security, and trustworthiness. These strategies will undergo testing within at least four diverse Energy Communities, each characterized by unique attributes and governance models. The overarching objective is to assess advanced P2P trading and Energy Sharing tools, determine optimal implementation conditions, and consolidate the most promising solutions and associated business models. The P2P trading and Energy Sharing tools will account for existing flexibility services managed by transmission and distribution system operators (TSOs, DSOs), including both implicit and explicit demand response (DR) programs, as well as dynamic capacity and price signals/contracts. The initiative strives to enhance coordination leveraging information exchange through existing dataspaces and middleware. Decision support algorithms will empower consumers and prosumers to actively engage in energy and flexibility services, promoting negotiation and collaboration among peers and stakeholders maximizing their benefits. All interactions, offers, contracts, and coordination within P2P trading and Energy Sharing tools will adhere to existing and forthcoming standards, and will be executed using blockchain. This approach ensures the credibility and traceability of all activities conducted in P2P trading, ultimately fostering greater consumer engagement.

Immune-mediated diseases (IMIDs) are an increasing medical burden in industrialized countries worldwide. IMIDs are characterized by an enormous heterogeneity with regard to disease outcome and response to targeted therapies, which currently cannot be adequately anticipated to tailor individual patient management. Hence, mechanistic understanding of this heterogeneity and biomarkers predictive for disease control and therapy response over time are important prerequisites of a future precision medicine in IMIDs. ImmUniverse has been formed as a European transdisciplinary consortium to tackle these unmet needs and to understand the role of the crosstalk between tissue microenvironment and immune cells in disease progression and response to therapy of two different IMIDs: ulcerative colitis and atopic dermatitis. Following this unique cross-disease approach ImmUniverse will fill the gap and the limitations of current studies, which do not systematically compare the complex interactions between recirculating immune cells and the respective tissue microenvironment. The consortium will combine analysis of tissue-derived signatures with “circulating signatures” detectable in liquid biopsies, employing state-of-the-art profiling technologies corresponding to multi-Omics datasets. The project will also bring diagnostics in IMID to a new level by implementing disruptive non-invasive liquid-biopsy methodology in combination with novel, validated circulating biomarker assays which are expected to improve diagnosis, inform early in the clinical course on disease severity and progression and enable treatment response monitoring. The identified signature will be validated to monitor state/progression and response to therapy in prospective observational cohorts. Realization of these objectives will result in improvement of patient management, lead to increased patient well-being and will significantly reduce the socioeconomic burden of these diseases.