Forty million individuals worldwide suffer from type 1 diabetes. This disease is managed by insulin therapy in a vast majority of patients because of the limited accessibility of beta cell replacement therapies (pancreas or islet of Langerhans transplantation). There is an urgent need for the development of a beta cell replacement therapy that will be available to larger numbers of type 1 diabetic patients. The VANGUARD project aims to deliver an Advanced Therapeutic Medicinal Product (ATMP) of high translational potential, with properties of increased functionality and implantability and protection from immune destruction. We will construct a bioartificial pancreas by assembling insulin- producing organoids, composed of islet cells, human amniotic epithelial cells (hAEC) and blood outgrowth endothelial cells (BOECs), into an amniotic membrane-derived hydrogel. Components of the amniotic membrane will provide extracellular matrix and mechanical protection and confer their well-defined anti-inflammatory and immunomodulatory properties to the constructs. hAECs will be genome-edited to overexpress and locally release immunomodulatory molecules (HLA-G, HLA-E, CD47 and PD-L1) and endothelial cells will enhance graft revascularization. Functionality, biocompatibility, potency and safety of the bioartificial pancreas will be assessed in vitro and in vivo by implantation in mice reconstituted with a human immune system as pre-clinical model. The consortium consists of 5 academic institutions with leading scientists in their field, 2 SMEs and 1 NGO with expertise in ethical and social aspects of transplantation. The ATMP delivered upon completion of the project will provide a model for rapid development of a bioartificial pancreas, utilizing “infinite” sources of insulin-producing cells (stem cell-derived, xenogeneic), and available to all type 1 diabetic patients before they develop the devastating chronic complications of the disease.

Trust plays a very important role in economic and social interactions. It reduces transaction costs, promotes efficiency in markets, improves cooperation, and increases the ability of people, organizations and countries to adapt to complexity and change. Trust is also very fragile and can be easily break with extremely detrimental consequences for society. This highly interdisciplinary research project aims to develop a pioneer analysis of what is considered one of the most fundamental threats of trust, and, a major concern of modern society: dishonesty. The central objective of “IDEA” is to provide a better understanding of the determinants of dishonest behaviour by incorporates psychological, emotional and social factors that have been only recently brought into economics. Within this framework, “IDEA” intends to develop and test new mechanisms to fight against dishonesty which entail a lower cost for society, and preserve the freedom of citizen. More specifically, “IDEA” will investigate what individual characteristics are more/less likely to be associated with dishonest behaviour to provide a better understanding of deceptive behaviour, and obtain an identikit of a dishonest individual. It will examine the nexus between dishonesty and competition, in order to determine why competitive pressures induce more cheating, and which features of the competitive environment are linked to more dishonesty. By exploring the deterrence effect of information disclosure on audits and sanctions, “IDEA” will help to develop an optimal system of sanctions which discourage dishonesty, and minimize the monetary costs of the enforcement authority and the psychological costs of the citizens.

Five leading European supercomputing centres are committed to develop, within their respective national programs and service portfolios, a set of services that will be federated across a consortium. The work will be undertaken by the following supercomputing centres, which form the High Performance Analytics and Computing (HPAC) Platform of the Human Brain Project (HBP): ▪ Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) in Spain, ▪ The Italian supercomputing centre CINECA, ▪ The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre CSCS, ▪ The Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany, and ▪ Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (CEA), France (joining in April 2018). The new consortium will be called Fenix and it aims at providing scalable compute and data services in a federated manner. The neuroscience community is of particular interest in this context and the HBP represents a prioritised driver for the Fenix infrastructure design and implementation. The Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure for the HBP (ICEI) project will realise key elements of this Fenix infrastructure that are targeted to meet the needs of the neuroscience community. The participating sites plan for cloud-like services that are compatible with the work cultures of scientific computing and data science. Specifically, this entails developing interactive supercomputing capabilities on the available extreme computing and data systems. Key features of the ICEI infrastructure are: ▪ Scalable compute resources; ▪ A federated data infrastructure; and ▪ Interactive Compute Services providing access to the federated data infrastructure as well as elastic access to the scalable compute resources. The ICEI e-infrastructure will be realised through a coordinated procurement of equipment and R&D services. Furthermore, significant additional parts of the infrastructure and R&D services will be realised within the ICEI project through in-kind contributions from the participating supercomputing centres.

Influenza is a major public health problem. In a conservative estimate, influenza infects annually 60 of the 500 million inhabitants of the EU. Vaccines are the cornerstone for preventing influenza and its consequences. Current influenza vaccines have a moderate variable effect, given the mismatch between vaccine and circulating strains, waning immunity and interference from previous vaccination, among others. The single most important challenge in achieving VE studies for the various influenza vaccines put every year on the European market is the ability of the different stakeholders to work in collaboration. To enable a sustainable network of influenza vaccine VE studies, the Development of Robust and Innovative Vaccines Effectiveness (DRIVE) main goal will be the development of a governance model between public and private entities. This model will ensure scientific independence in the studies and full transparency, allowing different stakeholders to fulfill their needs taking into account their respective obligations and statutes. A second challenge will be to reach the capacity to perform vaccine brand- specific effectiveness studies, which is agile enough to deliver the needed outputs in timely manner, and robust enough to provide results by different age and risk groups and flexible enough to utilize novel tools while at the same time aims to be sustainable. Combining these outputs, DRIVE will establish a sustainable platform for joint influenza vaccine effectiveness evaluation which will have a positive impact on European citizens public health.

Science4CleanEnergy, S4CE, is a multi-disciplinary consortium, of world-leading academics, research laboratories, SMEs and industries. S4CE will develop a project that includes fundamental studies of fluid transport and reactivity, development of new instruments and methods for the detection and quantification of emissions, micro-seismic events etc., lab and field testing of such new technologies, and the deployment of the successful detection and quantification technologies in sub-surface sites for continuous monitoring of the risks identified by the European Commission. S4CE leverages approximately 500M EUR in existing investments on 4 scientific field sites. S4CE will utilize monitoring data acquired during the project in these field sites on which (a) it will be possible to quantify the environmental impact of sub-surface geo-energy applications; (b) new technologies will be demonstrated; (c) data will be collected during the duration of the project, and potentially after the end of the project. Using reliable data, innovative analytical models and software, S4CE will quantify the likelihood of environmental risks ranging from fugitive emissions, water contamination, induced micro-seismicity, and local impacts. Such quantifications will have enormous positive societal consequences, because environmental risks will be prevented and mitigated. S4CE set up a probabilistic methodology to assess and mitigate both the short and the long term environmental risks connected to the exploration and exploitation of sub-surface geo-energy. S4CE will maintain a transparent dialogue with all stakeholders, including the public at large, the next generation of scientists, academics and industrial operators, including training of young post-graduate students and post-doctoral researchers. S4CE will deliver the independent assessment of the environmental footprint related to geo-energy sub-surface operations, having as primary impact the assistance to to policy making.