International Research Projects
EUnetCCC JA The European Comprehensive Cancer Centre Network
- Call
- EU4H-2023-JA-3-IBA-07
- Principal investigator
- Jose Luis Poveda
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2024
Comprehensive Cancer Centers (CCCs) are at the forefront of cancer research, treatment, and education. Their multidisciplinary approach ensures that patients benefit from the latest scientific advancements, from early detection to innovative treatments and post-treatment care. The establishment of the European Comprehensive Cancer Centre (EUCCC) network represents a harmonized and integrated approach to cancer care across the continent. This initiative, rooted in the principles of excellence and collaboration. The primary objective of the EU CCC network is to create a cohesive and integrated consortium of CCCs across Europe to ensure that all patients, regardless of their location, have access to high-quality care. This network will also serve as a platform for collaboration, allowing centres to share best practices, resources, and knowledge. Such collaboration is essential in promoting research, integrating the latest findings into clinical care, and ensuring that patients benefit from the most effective treatments available. The network will facilitate the adoption of quality diagnostic and treatment methods, including training, research and clinical trials across the EU. It should contribute to: (a) reducing inequalities of diagnosis, treatment and care, and access to clinical trials; (b) strengthening the quality of outcomes research; (c) integrating clinical care and research and evaluating the quality of cancer care throughout. This European collaboration will improve patients' access to high-quality diagnostics, care and innovative treatments.
TTV GUIDE TX personalisation of immunosuppression by monitoring viral load post kidney transplantation - A randomised controlled phase ii trial
- Call
- Call H2020-SC1-2020-Two-Stage-RTD
- Principal investigator
- Isabel Beneyto
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2021
Challenge: End stage renal disease (ESRD) causes high socioeconomic burden for citizens and the healthcare system in Europe. Kidney transplantation represents the treatment standard for ESRD. Graft rejection due to inadequate immunosuppression is the leading cause for chronic graft dysfunction and infectious disease due to reduced immune function is one of the leading causes of death following kidney transplantation. Optimization of immunosuppressive drugs is a crucial step to minimize the risk of infection and rejection and thereby prolonging patient and graft survival.
Background: The peripheral blood copy number of the ubiquitous and non-pathogenic torque teno virus (TTV) is associated with the grade of the immunosuppression of its host. Non-interventional studies suggest superiority of TTV copy number guided immunosuppression compared to standard strategies.
Objectives: To demonstrate the safety and preliminary efficacy of TTV-guided dosing of immunosuppressive drugs to reduce infections and rejection.
Method: A phase II trial to compare TTV-guided immunosuppression with the current standard strategy in kidney transplant recipients.
Ambition: The proposed project tests a novel and original approach. TTV allows for analysis of the function of the entire immune system instead of specific compartments. For the first time a holistic assessment of the human immune system will be tested in an interventional randomized and controlled setting.
Impact: The proposed project will impact clinical practice by reducing infection and graft rejection by 20% thereby significantly improving graft and patient survival of kidney transplant patients. The improved dosing will reduce healthcare costs by ~€ 50 million in the EU. The project will serve as a proof-of-concept for TTV bases assessment of the immune system, with potential applications in solid organ transplantation, autoimmune and infectious disease and oncology.
Better Better rEal-world healTh-daTa distributEd analytics Research platform
- Call
- HORIZON-HLTH-2023-TOOL-05
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2023
In recent years, data-driven medicine has gained increasing importance in terms of diagnosis, treatment, and research due to the exponential growth of healthcare data. The linkage of cross-border health data from various sources, including genomics, and analysis via innovative approaches based on artificial intelligence (AI) will enable a better understanding of risk factors, causes, and the development of optimal treatment in different disease areas. Nevertheless, the reuse of patient data is often limited to datasets available at a single medical centre. The main reasons why health data is not shared across institutional borders rely on ethical, legal, and privacy aspects and rules. Therefore, in order to (1) enable health data sharing across national borders, (2) fully comply with present GDPR privacy guidelines /regulations and (3) innovate by pushing research beyond the state of the art, BETTER proposes a robust decentralised privacypreserving infrastructure which will empower researchers, innovators and healthcare professionals to exploit the full potential of larger sets of multi-source health data via tailored made AI tools useful to compare, integrate, and analyse in a secure, cost-effective fashion; with the very final aim of supporting the improvement of citizen's health outcomes.
In detail, this interdisciplinary project proposes the co-creation of 3 clinical use cases involving 7 medical centres located in the EU and beyond, where sensitive patient data, including genomics, are made available and analysed in a GDPR-compliant mechanism via a Distributed Analytics (DA) paradigm called the Personal Health Train (PHT). The main principle of the PHT is that the analytical task is brought to the data provider (medical centre) and the data instances remain in their original location. In this project, two mature implementations of the PHT (PADME and Vantage6) already validated in real-world scenarios will be fused together to build the BETTER platform.
SAFEST Improving quality and patient Safety in surgical care through Standardisation and harmonisation of perioperative care in Europe
- Call
- HORIZON-HLTH-2021-CARE-05
- Principal investigator
- Eva Romero
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2022
The European Commission estimates that 8% to 12% of patients admitted to hospitals in the EU suffer adverse events, many following surgical procedures. The results can be devastating in terms of loss of life and possible long-term disability.
When considering surgical safety, we must consider that a patient's journey starts weeks, sometimes months, before the actual procedure takes place, and it continues after discharge. Studies have shown that 53% to 70% of adverse events occur outside the operating room. It is within this context that SAFEST will strive to address patient safety during the complete perioperative journey.
SMARTER Smart MAnufactuRing for Autologous Cell ThERapies enabled by innovative biomonitoring technologies and advanced process control
- Call
- HORIZON-EIC-2021-PATHFINDERCHALLENGES-01-03
- Principal investigator
- Agustín Lahoz
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2022
Autologous immunotherapies (e.g. CAR-T) have revolutionised cancer treatment providing impressive survival benefits in patients with hardest-to-treat blood cancers. The next generation of personalised immunotherapies using tumour-infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) aims to overcome efficacy limitations of CAR-T therapies in the treatment of solid tumours. Lack of effective, fast, adaptive, controllable, and scalable manufacturing process remains one of the critical bottlenecks for a clinical adoption of such complex personalised cell therapies.
In the SMARTER project, Achilles Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company developing autologous cell therapies, will collaborate with the centre of excellence for Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult and academic experts in process biomarker discovery (Instituto de Investigacion Sanitaria La Fe) and bioprocess sensor development (Leibniz Universitat Hannover). The consortium aims to develop a first-in-class, smart bioprocessing manufacturing platform for personalised autologous cell therapies, implementing for the first-time inline process analytical technologies and smart process control systems. The project exploits breakthrough discoveries of novel T-cell expansion process biomarkers and development of new fluorescence spectroscopy sensors for a real-time monitoring of critical process parameters, that will enable adaptive process control of the precision TIL biomanufacturing process. After the project, the prototype R&D platform will be ready for a follow-up development of the commercial scale bioreactor in GMP environment.
The SMARTER platform with advanced process control will critically improve production efficiency, reduce overall costs-of-goods, shorten manufacturing cycle times (shorter vein-to-vein time), decrease batch failures and lead to more consistent and predictable cell therapy product quality. Finally, the innovations will enable clinical implementation of a potential breakthrough personalised adoptive cell therapy for hardest-to-treat solid tumours, such as lung cancer and melanoma.
AECC Talent FCAECC Fellowship programme for talented researchers in cancer
- Call
- HORIZON-MSCA-2021-COFUND-01
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2021
Fellows will have a wide choice of entities and multidisciplinary teams in which to carry out the project of their interest. The host organizations are endorsed by the Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer and report a high number of international collaborations and participation in European and international projects. With their projects, AECC Talent fellows will contribute to improving prevention, early diagnosis, disease monitoring and treatment of cancer patients, which are key intervention areas of the Horizon Europe Cancer Mission.
PanCareSurPass PanCareSurPass Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) effects using human endometrial organoids
- Call
- H2020-SC1-2020-Two-Stage-RTD
- Principal investigator
- Adela Cañete
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2021
Almost 500,000 former childhood cancer patients (CCS) are now living in Europe. Compared to the general population, CCS represent a vulnerable population as they are at an increased risk of developing health problems, known as late effects, resulting in excess morbidity and mortality. Many survivors are unaware of their personal risk for specific late effects, which reduces their ability to manage their own follow-up care. Similarly, their treating healthcare professionals (HCPs) lack information about care required for CCS and access to treatment data from their childhood cancer. The Survivorship Passport (SurPass) is an innovative, digital tool, developed in previous EU-funded projects, that can be used to overcome these knowledge gaps to improve long-term survivorship care.
PanCareSurPass will conduct a robust assessment of the implementation of the SurPass by first conducting a preimplementation study in six countries (Austria, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Spain) representing three infrastructural scenarios in Europe. This includes a technological assessment to develop or adopt the current SurPass IT infrastructures to allow implementation in different settings. Project partners include organisations representing CCS and HCPs to ensure all relevant perspectives from the actors involved in person-centred care are heard. Ethical, structural, organisational, economical, national, local, privacy issues, health systems, and particular national circumstances will be taken into account throughout. An Implementation Strategy will be developed and the SurPass will be implemented in these countries, looking at a range of outcomes including CCS/HCP satisfaction, barriers and facilitators to implementation and economic aspects. Based on the results of the study, the Implementation Strategy will be revised and a Prediction Model developed to promote and support future implementations of the SurPass across Europe.
InnDIH InnDIH - Valencia Region Digital Innovation Hub
- Call
- DIGITAL-2021-EDIH-01
- Principal investigator
- Guillermo Sanz Santillana
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2023
InnDIH is the Valencian Region European Digital Innovation Hub (EDIH) which represents the centralized public-private initiative in the region for the digitization of SMEs and public administration and boost the economic development of the Valencian Region. InnDIH represents the alliance among the business ecosystem, universities, technology and research centres, biotechnology-health research institutes and public administrations, focusing on Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as other technologies such as HPC, Cybersecurity, Big Data and Robotics, covering mainly Advanced Manufacturing and Quality of life & Health sector, vey in line with the Valencian S3 strategy.
InnDIH's strength is based on the infrastructures for experimentation and the technological, business and access to finance knowledge of the partners of a consortium led by ITI, in combination with a solid experience and connections at the European level, conforming a complete and complementary ecosystem for the provision of high value digitalization services to SMEs and Public Administrations (PAs) for technology uptake, support and definition of new business models, organized in 4 blocks: Test before invest, Training and skills, Support to find investments and Innovation ecosystem and networking. This set of services is based on demonstration, enabling and experimentation infrastructures and it is adapted to the needs of the territory, and thanks to the support received from the European Commission, the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, and the Valencian Region Government, the companies receiving them do not have to pay anything.
Project activities and results will be actively disseminated by the consortium, collaborating with Digital Transformation Accelerator (DTA) and other EU networks, organizing events and meetings at EU and regional level with stakeholders, policy-makers, EEN, etc. InnDIH portfolio of services will be reinforced by the links with the EDIH network, solving other users' technology needs, starting from the 26 corridors already set (6 individual ones, 20 from EuHubs4Data). In a nutshell, InnDIH grows in a rich ecosystem, following the EU's objective to attain industrial and social wealth through the green and digital transition. Its participation as an EDIH in the DIGITAL programme is a key element to boost digitalization in the Valencia region
PRAETORIAN Protection of Critical Infrastructures from advanced combined cyber and physical threats
- Call
- H2020-SU-INFRA-2018-2019-2020
- Principal investigator
- Dr. Bernardo Valdivieso
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2023
PRAETORIAN strategic goal is to increase the security and resilience of European CIs, facilitating the coordinated protection of interrelated Critical Infraestructure (CI) against combined physical and cyber threats. To that end, the project will provide a multidimensional (economical, technological, policy, societal) yet installation-specific toolset comprising: (i) a Physical Situation Awareness system, (ii) a Cyber Situation Awareness system; (iii) a Hybrid Situation Awareness system, which will include digital twins of the infrastructure under protection; and (iv) a Coordinated Response system. The PRAETORIAN toolset will support the security managers of CI in their decision making to anticipate and withstand potential cyber, physical or combined security threats to their own infrastructures and other interrelated CIs that could have a severe impact on their performance and/or the security of the population in their vicinity.
The project will specifically tackle (i.e. prevent, detect, response and, in case of a declared attack, mitigate) human-made cyber and physical attacks or natural disasters affecting CIs. It will also address how an attack or incident in a specific CI can jeopardise the normal operation of other neighbouring/interrelated CIs, and how to make all of them more resilient, by predicting cascading effects and proposing a unified response among CIs and assisting First Responder teams.
PRAETORIAN is a CI-led, user-driven project, which will demonstrate its results in three international pilot clusters -some of them cross border- involving 9 outstanding critical infrastructures: 2 international airports, 2 ports, 3 hospitals and 2 power plants.
PersonalizeAF Personalized Therapies for Atrial Fibrillation. A Translational Approach.
- Call
- H2020-MSCA-ITN-2019
- Principal investigator
- Dr. Pilar Sepúlveda, IIS La Fe
- Role
- Participant
- Year
- 2020
PersonalizeAF partnership aggregates relevant scientific staff from the academic and clinical world with highly specialised biomedical companies which will be involved in a high-level personalised training programme that will train a new generation of highly skilled professionals and guarantee ESRs and future PhD students outstanding Career Opportunities in the biomedical engineering, cardiology services and medical devices sectors. PersonalizeAF will disseminate results to a wide spectrum of stakeholders, create awareness in the general public about atrial fibrillation and encourage vocational careers among young students.