GUT-4D tackles a pivotal frontier in biomedicine: leveraging the gut microbiome to transform the diagnosis, mechanistic understanding, and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, frontotemporal dementia, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The project unites four interconnected research pillars, stool-based diagnostics, gut–disease mechanistic links, dysbiosis drivers, and microbiota-improving interventions, within a rigorously standardized clinical framework for sample and data management. First, GUT-4D will deliver clinically translatable, stool-based biomarker panels by integrating metagenomics, metaproteomics, metabolomics, and host markers with multi-class machine-learning models, overcoming the limitations of single-disease, binary classifiers and advancing omics diagnostics toward validated, assay-ready tools. Second, it will dissect causal gut–brain and gut–immune pathways by combining deeply phenotyped patient cohorts with ex vivo and in vitro mechanistic experiments, mapping microbial metabolites and host proteins, to reveal disease-specific triggers. Third, the project pioneers an exposome–microbiome pipeline that detects exogenous compounds and microbial products directly in fecal samples and applies Exposome-Wide Association analyses, followed by rapid ex vivo functional testing and targeted cellular assays, to build a Modifiable Driver Atlas of actionable dysbiosis factors. Finally, GUT-4D translates insights into therapeutic strategies with pre/pro/synbiotics, postbiotics, and other ecosystem “repair” approaches validated on adaptive ex vivo platforms. By integrating microbiology, clinical medicine, data science, and environmental health, GUT-4D provides a four-dimensional, bench-to-bedside program poised to shift NDD care from correlative observations to predictive, mechanism-guided diagnostics and interventions, strengthening Europe’s capacity for next-generation, microbiome-enabled healthcare.

The ISIDORe consortium, made of the capacities of European ESFRI infrastructures and coordinated networks, proposes to assemble the largest and most diverse research and service providing instrument to study infectious diseases in Europe, from structural biology to clinical trials. Giving scientists access to the whole extent of our state of the art facilities, cutting edge services, advanced equipment and expertise, in an integrated way and with a common goal, will enable or accelerate the generation of new knowledge and intervention tools to ultimately help control SARS CoV 2 in particular, and epidemic prone pathogens in general, while avoiding fragmentation and duplication among European initiatives. Such a global and interdisciplinary approach is meant to allow the implementation of user projects that are larger, more ambitious and more impactful than the EU supported transnational activities that the consortium is used to run. Our proposition is ambitious but achievable in a timely fashion due to the relevance and previous experience of the partners that we have gathered and that have complementary fields of expertise, which addresses the need for an interdisciplinary effort. Leveraging all these existing strengths to develop synergies will create an additional value and enhance Europe capacity for controlling emerging or re emerging and epidemic infectious diseases, starting with the COVID 19 pandemic. Such a global and coordinated approach is consistent with the recommendations of the One Health concept and necessary to make significant contributions to solving complex societal problems like epidemics and pandemics.

In the recent years an unprecedented effort has been made to increase the rates of childhood immunization in resource poor countries. This has translated into an increased number of children receiving vaccines and a parallel decrease in the rate of illnesses from vaccine preventable diseases. However, in some regions it has proven difficult to achieve optimal levels of immunization mainly because of issues concerning communication, management and poor utilization of resources. Recent studies have questioned the validity of available vaccine coverage data and the way they are collected. Currently, both the progress of the vaccination programs and indirectly the level of protection in a population are inferred on the basis of administrative records. This largely unverified information is also utilized as performance indicator to allocate funds from government and donor agencies. Such self-certification practice does not incentivize the optimization of resources while it has been increasingly questioned in terms of its validity and integrity. We propose to develop and validate an innovative technical solution based on an assay system that integrates multiplex capability and analytical performance, to simultaneously quantify antibody levels against the major vaccine components, with both automation and wireless connectivity to produce spatial-temporal co-ordinates of individual determinations. The multiplex capability will facilitate the analysis of cross coverage monitoring while generating reactivity profiles against the different vaccine components to discriminate vaccinated versus infected individuals. Spatial temporal co-ordinates of assay results will be used to generate interactive data sets for modeling changes in the age-specific risk of infection and the risk of outbreaks. The proposed system represents a formidable tool of unprecedented power to monitor the progress of different vaccination programs and experimentally validate record-based coverage data. The consortium proposes to develop an additional implementation of the technology, a low-cost portable microarray solution for healthcare point of testing (i.e. private doctors or pediatrician clinics, small district hospitals, rapid control of real vaccination profile in emergency situations) that converts the protein microarray for the determination of antibody protection against vaccines antigens into a lateral flow protein microarray, which can be coupled with software application for Smart phones to read the results.

SCENARIOS will devise and demonstrate a comprehensive set of technological solutions to address the detection, (bio)monitoring, long-term toxicity, risk assessment, pollution control and remediation of Per- and polyFluoroAlkyl Substances (PFASs) as a test bed for zero pollution ambition from refractory and mobile organic chemicals. SCENARIOS's approach and technologies will be self-sustainable, (near) net-zero energy and will smoothly integrate in the circular economies of EU countries and worldwide. A harmonised composition of the project consortium encompassing renewed academic and research centers and competitive technological SMEs will ensure SCENARIOS? replication and impact and continental level and beyond. The project will fill the knowledge gap and deliver disruptive remediation TRL advancements for probably the most awkward and widespread toxic class of contaminants -PFAS- with unprecedented energetic balance and the near absence of external chemical additions promoting EU leadership in the sector and a significant advance in the research field. The industrial core of SCENARIOS will enable four demonstrations (case studies) within EU industries and a public health institution stepping forward a set of industrial and societal sectors where pollutant remediation and health surveillance have excellent potential for the Green Deal implementation.