Each year 15 million babies are born prematurely and many suffer from respiratory failure due to immaturity of the lung and lack of control of breathing. Although respiratory support, especially mechanical ventilation, can improve their survival, it also causes severe injury to the vulnerable lung resulting in severe and chronic pulmonary morbidity lasting in to adulthood. Heterogeneity of lung aeration, resulting in areas of lung over inflation and lung collapse, plays a crucial part in the risk of mortality and morbidity due to respiratory failure. This distribution of lung aeration cannot be detected by currently available bedside monitoring tools and imaging methods. Thus, an imaging technique for continuous non-invasive bedside monitoring of infants lung function is urgently needed. In order to address this, CRADL will use EIT technology to establish a monitoring tool for interventions in the paediatric population. Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a non-radiative, inexpensive technique that can facilitate real time dynamic monitoring of lung aeration, and recent studies have shown that it is effective in monitoring aeration in preterm babies. CRADL will show how EIT can provide new cost effective, easy to use, respiratory management tools and clinical protocols that can be universally adopted to reduce deaths and disability in preterm babies by delivering a tool that provides continuous, non-invasive, radiation free, bedside information on regional lung aeration and ventilation during daily clinical care of (preterm) infants and children with respiratory failure. CRADL will also assess the effectiveness, efficacy and safety of such a system in guiding respiratory management and supportive care of the most common causes of paediatric respiratory failure (respiratory distress syndrome, bronchiolitis and acute respiratory distress syndrome), with the final goal of reducing short and long term adverse effects of disease and its treatment in this populat

Most medical interventions are effective in only a small percentage of the patients. The multifactorial nature of disease and patient differences in presentation, genetics and exposures have been implicated as the causes. Precision medicine aims to maximize the effectiveness of medicine by tailoring the diagnosis and treatment to match individual patients. This proposal will establish an Integrated Precision Medicine Technologies Research Centre of Excellence, a multidisciplinary centre which will be a leader in the development of new technologies to further enable and accelerate the progress and application of precision medicine. The Centre will include all the essential fields: (i) modelling & simulations, (ii) intelligent systems & bioinformatics, (iii) imaging & biosignal analysis, (iv) digital & eHealth, (v) embedded systems & electronics, and (vi) sensing technologies (including nano), with support from (vii) biosciences and (viii) clinical validation. Initially, the clinical emphasis will be on tools and methods for relevant multifactorial diseases: cancer, neurodegenerative disorders and traumatic brain injury. The proposal is a collaboration between leading Cypriot and European institutions. The host, the University of Cyprus, is the country’s leading academic institution, with local partners including major medical centres as well as support from the Ministry of Health and other private organizations. The advanced partners are the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Technology (BMT), Germany, and the Centre for Biomedical Research - Bioengineering, Biomaterials & Nanomedicine (CIBER-BBN), Spain. The experience of the partners, combined with the synergies created by this project, provide a great opportunity to establish a sustainable Centre which will (i) conduct vital and timely research, (ii) promote innovation, (iii) provide education and training to a new breed of scientists, (iv) improve the local research capacity, and (v) spearhead economic growth.

Euromix aim to develop an experimentally verified, tiered strategy for the risk assessment of mixtures of multiple chemicals derived from multiple sources across different life stages. The project takes account of the gender dimension and balances the risk of chemicals present in foods against the benefits of those foods. Important concepts for this new strategy are prioritisation criteria for chemicals based on their exposure and hazard characteristics and evaluation of the role of mode of action in grouping chemicals into cumulative assessment groups. In-silico and in-vitro tools will be developed and verified against in-vivo experiments, with focus on four selected endpoints (liver, hormones, development and immunology) to provide a full proof-of-principle. The EuroMix project will result in an innovative platform of bioassays for mixture testing and refined categorisation of chemicals in cumulative assessment groups. New hazard and exposure models will be embedded in a model toolbox, made available for stakeholders through an openly accessible web-based platform. Access to the web-based tools will be facilitated by training. Criteria will be set and guidance will be written on how to use and implement the tiered test strategy. Dissemination and harmonisation of the approach within EU, Codex Alimentarius, and WHO will be achieved by involving a.o. WHO and US-EPA in the project and by the participation of experts playing a key role in helping establish international food safety policies. It is expected that the new mechanism-based strategy, the bioassay platform, the openly accessible web-based model toolbox, and clear guidance on a tiered hazard and exposure test and risk assessment strategy will boost innovation in the public and private sector, provide a sound scientific basis for managing risks to public health from chemical mixtures, ultimately reduce the use of laboratory animals, and support the global discussion of risk assessment policies for mixtures.

"DiTECT will develop an integrated framework for real-time detection, assessment, and mitigation of biological, chemical and environmental contaminants throughout the food supply chain. Bringing together research, industrial and food authority partners representing the agro-food industry in the EU and China, DiTECT aspires to establish the foundation for future food safety monitoring platforms, through the development of a standards-based, modular, Big Data-enabled platform, capable of accurately predicting food safety parameters of a given food product based on data collected in real-time via cost-efficient sensors, at crop, grain storage, livestock and finally in the food supply, incorporating blockchain processes. DiTECT integrates multidisciplinary research teams from fields such as microbial and spectroscopic fingerprinting technologies; emerging ICT-based food tracing systems; signal analysis and data mining. Microbial profiling will be attained via conventional microbiological analyses in tandem with advanced molecular methods (e.g., NGS-based metagenomics), while spectroscopic profiling will be based on spectral data generated using appropriate rapid, non-invasive methods and sensor devices. DiTECT recognizes that current food-chains are lacking a complete snapshot view of food safety at the crop/livestock and finished product levels, and so foresees the development of a cloud-enabled storage system for all data corresponding to different insights of product-specific safety aspects, to be integrated into. The novel food safety services will be demonstrated in four (4) real-world Pilots with the active engagement of 21 EU and 13 CN partners, using real datasets to validate efficiency improvements. The carefully structured work plan embodies a “multi-actor” approach to prototype and validates a ready-for-take-up framework of significant exploitation potential for the agro-food industry."