Now open: ERC Consolidator Grants Call 2018

ERC Consolidator Grants are designed to support excellent Principal Investigators at the career stage at which they are consolidating their own independent research team.

Up to €2 mio are available for projects of up to 5 years duration.

The call closes on 15 February 2018.

The mandatory templates are available from the Participant Portal once having registered for the call.

For more information, please consult the ERC website. 

Sources: Euresearch, ERC

Draft H2020 Work Programmes 2018-2020

The European Commission is currently making public the draft work programmes 2018-2020 for most of the thematic programmes in Horizon 2020. These drafts are available before their adoption to provide potential participants with the currently expected main lines of the work programmes. The remaining drafts are expected to be released this week.

Please note that they are still in a DRAFT version and as such have not been adopted or endorsed by the European Commission. Any views expressed are the views of the Commission services and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the Commission.

The adoption of the work programme will be announced on the Horizon 2020 website and on the Participant Portal towards end of October 2017. Only the adopted work programmes will have legal value. Information and topic descriptions indicated in these drafts may not appear in the final work programme; and likewise, new elements may be introduced at a later stage.

More information and links to the draft work programmes can be found on the EC website.  

Sources: EC, Euresearch

Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI): evaluations of IMI1 and IMI2

The Innovative Medicines Initiative has just published the final review of the IMI1 programme, and the mid-term review of IMI2.

The experts conclude that IMI programme ‘remains relevant and justified’ and that ‘positive contributions on the drug development process have been realised’. Positive points recognised in the reports include:

- the IMI role in the creation of collaborative research networks that have enhanced trust between partners from different sectors, and triggered a mind shift as partners came to understand each other’s needs;
- the quality of the research emerging from IMI projects;
- the creation of important resources and tools for drug development, some of which are already being used by researchers in their daily work.

The reports also note that 90% of the people who responded to the online survey agreed that the EU should cooperate with industry in the context of a public-private partnership on health.

Suggestions for improvement concern performance indicators, increasing the involvement of SMEs as well as dissemination and communication of the projects' results.

Read the European Commission's press release on the evaluation
Read the new IMI brochure on results and impacts

Source: IMI

Swiss wins 2017 Nobel Prize in chemistry

Jacques Dubochet of Switzerland's University of Lausanne has been awarded this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry together with two other scientists from Britain and the United States.

Announcing the winners on Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three scientists helped develop cryo-electron microscopy - a method to have detailed images of life’s complex machineries in atomic resolution.

Dubochet, born in 1942, is a honorary professor of biophysics at Lausanne University and worked at Basel and Geneva Universities.

Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) 2 Call 13: Indicative Topics Published

IMI 2 has just published a list of indicative topics for the call 13 which is foreseen to be launched before the end of the year.

The following topics are under consideration for inclusion in future IMI calls for proposals:

- Assessment of the uniqueness of diabetic cardiomyopathy relative to other forms of heart failure using unbiased pheno-mapping approaches
- Genome-environment interactions in inflammatory skin disease
- The value of diagnostics to combat antimicrobial resistance by optimising antibiotic use
- Mitochondrial dysfunction in neurodegeneration
- Support and coordination action for the projects of the neurodegeneration area of the Innovative Medicines Initiative
- A sustainable European induced pluripotent stem cell platform
- Linking digital assessment of mobility to clinical endpoints to drive regulatory acceptance and clinical practice
- Human tumour microenvironment immunoprofiling
- CONCEPTION - continuum of evidence from pregnancy exposures, reproductive toxicology and breastfeeding to improve outcomes now
- Improving the preclinical prediction of adverse effects of pharmaceuticals on the nervous system
- Translational safety biomarker pipeline (TRANSBIOLINE): enabling development and implementation of novel safety biomarkers in clinical trials and diagnosis of disease
- Federated and privacy-preserving machine learning in support of drug discovery
- Pilot programme on a clinical compound bank for repurposing. This programme includes the following topics: Cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, Respiratory diseases, Neurodegenerative diseases and Rare/orphan diseases

Source: IMI2

Evolution of the European framework programme

The European Parliament released an in-depth analysis on the advancement of and key data from FP1 to Horizon 2020 in view of FP9.

This paper aims to provide an overview of the evolution of the EU framework programme for research and innovation. The paper focuses on the evolution of the legal basis to adopt the programme, its structure and its budget. It then highlights key issues that will have to be addressed in the coming years in the discussion leading to the adoption of the ninth framework programme.

10 years ERC, 10 portraits

In 10 years, The European research council ERC has funded more than 1000 researchers across Europe. Discover here some of them.