Primary prevention of cancer through behaviour changes in adolescence – a critical period in which many risk behaviours are initiated –, is a huge health and societal challenge in Europe. In alignment with this need, SUNRISE will co-create, implement and evaluate an innovative digitally-enhanced life-skills programme for primary prevention of cancer through sustainable health behaviour change in adolescents, tailored to their socio-economic, cultural and environmental diversities. SUNRISE will combine an established, evidence-based digital solution for smoking prevention, with novel intervention approaches such as peer social media campaigns, advertising literacy training, educational games, and social robot platforms, to take cancer prevention approaches for adolescents in the EU to the next level. The digitally-enhanced programme and its components will be developed through co-creation with schools-as-living-labs methods involving multiple societal actors such as educators, adolescents, parents, public health experts, and policy-makers. The programme will be implemented and evaluated at large scale across 154 schools and 7500 students in urban and rural regions of 8 European countries - Greece, Switzerland, Slovenia, Spain, Cyprus, Italy, Belgium, Romania -, including socially disadvantaged groups such as migrants and ethnic minorities. The effectiveness of both methods for achieving long-term health behaviour change, as well as the implementation strategy for solution adoption and multi-country sustainability, will be evaluated. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on “Prevention & early detection (behavioural change).

AI-empowered Personalized Medicine promises to find tailored, targeted, nearly “hand-made” cures for patients. Cancer treatment desperately needs boosters to find tailored, targeted cures for patients and Personalized Medicine can play a crucial role. Tailored targeted therapies in cancer treatment are already a reality but the current practice of targeted therapies in cancer treatment has been derived with traditional methods of data analysis. AI-empowered Personalized Medicine may help to bring targeted therapies to the next level. However, no matter how precise it is, no matter how many lives it can save in principle, and no matter if it can utilize the entire medical knowledge. If clinicians do not understand its suggestions and decisions, AI-empowered Personalized Medicine will not be a game changer, clinicians will not use it to make everyday decisions and, thus, it is doomed to fail. Hence, the real challenge is building AI-empowered Personalized Medicine systems that can be accepted by clinicians and clinical researchers. In KATY, we grasp the above challenge and we propose an AI-empowered Personalized Medicine system that can bring medical “AI-empowered knowledge” to the tips of the fingers of clinicians and clinical researchers. The AI-empowered knowledge is a human interpretable knowledge that clinicians and clinical researchers can: understand, trust and effectively use in their everyday working routine. KATY is then a AI-empowered Personalized Medicine system built around two main components: A Distributed Knowledge Graph and A pool of eXplainable Artificial Intelligence predictors. As a stress test and due to the lack of personalized clinical responses, KATY will be experimented in a low prevalence and complex cancer: Clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC).

The health care system is in crisis and although the importance of nurses' mental health is widely recognized, achieving this goal is highly challenging. Promoting resilience in times of crisis appears to be a promising goal for public mental health. Innovative digital technologies to enhance resilience might contribute to a solution. Extended reality (XR) applications are highly immersive, interactive, and attractive to use. The proposed project aims to leverage the potential of XR to promote resilience in nursing staff. As resilience has a multitude of facets a prospective cohort study together with new analysis of existing large datasets will inform about those resilience factors that are the most promising target for interventions in nurses. Likewise, barriers and facilitators of acceptance of resilience training in general and XR-supported interventions in particular will be extensively considered and researched within this project. As acceptance through participation is a key success factor, a XR-supported training to foster resilience will be developed in close cooperation with nurses and other stakeholders. The proposed XR2ESILIENCE solution consists of a flexible selection of XR modules that can be customised to meet individual nurse needs. The efficacy of XR2ESILIENCE on stress coping and resilience will be investigated in a randomised controlled trial including a health economic evaluation. In addition, the project will go beyond the individual perspective and consider organisational and structural challenges. The cohort study will enable to identify working environments where nurses can grow and enfold their resilience. Based on the results, will develop a set of recommendations and checklists for employers and policymakers that support them in making nursing facilities resilience friendly places. XR2ESILIENCE outlines a strategy for building resilience and the role of XR in resilience training.

The healthcare sector is hindered by several barriers that hamper the application of circular economy principles (e.g. the safety restrictions of the domain limit the use of recycled materials due to the need of materials biocompatibility, and safety in products to be used in the human body). Led by a multidisciplinary consortium of 39 partners (plus 13 industry affiliates) from 15 EU countries plus UK and USA, ENKORE aim to tackle challenges and develop an ecoDesign framework that supports the development of safe and environmental compliant devices eco-responsible packaging, which minimize the environmental impact, reduce the carbon footprint, and maximize the use and preservation of resources. The main goal is to connect the design of the medical devices packages with the end-of-life stage, thus the technologies that support circularity are taken into account at the medical device conception stage. ENKORE framework will be validated in 5 Reference Use Cases (RUCs), led by 5 different health regions that bring HPCs and policy maker, 3 large EU hospitals and the reference network for European Regional and Local Health Authorities (EUREGHA). The project developments and RUCs are supported by several associations and NGOs, a packaging manufacturer and a group of SMEs and researchers, specialists in circularity, LCA, social sciences, environment, circularity, and materials. The validation of the framework shall provide evidence to work with policymakers, creating new or revised standards and create tangible/quantitative evidence. Policy making and regulatory engagement will be strongly performed. The methods and tools comprise Environmental and Social Life Cycle Assessment (ELCA/SLCA), Circularity Calculator (CC) and Digital Product Passport (DPP) approaches, which could be adapted during the second stage of the proposal.

Despite emotions being a driver of political choices, building democratically meaningful emotional narratives in politics remains an uncharted territory. Hence the main venture of ENCODE is to decode the meanings of emotions and encode them to policy-making strategies aiming for a positive emotional turn, breaking the cycle of depolarisation. To meet this ambitious goal, ENCODE builds its conceptual frameworks arising from a novel concept of affective pluralisation, as opposed to affective polarisation. This term serves to frame empirical research carried out in 6 geographically diverse European countries, representing both EU member states and candidates. This study will span desk research, sentiment analysis, biometric research, in-depth interviews, experiments and panel survey. Such triangulation of research techniques ensures the accuracy and validity of the findings. These are further encoded into main outputs: catalogue of best practice to tackle disinformation in social media, emotional gap maps, validated survey questions and democratic resilience heatmaps. These outputs are not expected only to enhance current scientific framework, but also are planned to underpin the future emotional narratives co-designed by diverse groups of citizens in innovations labs and further validated by Delphi expert panels and vignette experiments. This bottom-up approach anchored in citizen science ensures that policy-making strategy are in first place created by citizens and only in the next step discussed by expert teams who will elaborate policy-making strategies, the roadmap for their implementation, alongside future foresight scenarios which will be disseminated widely across EU and EU wide community of 1000+ members. This strategy creates emotional bonds between ordinary citizens, increases trust in governance and supports better informed political decision-making and communication.