The aim of BLOBREC is to develop a blood-based test for the diagnosis of breast cancer. The test is based on results from gene expression analyses in a hospital based nested case-control study in the Norwegian Women and Cancer postgenome cohort study. The controls are healthy population controls from the same cohort. The innovative potential of a gene expression test is the independency from other test for breast cancer like imaging technologies (mammograms, ultrasound, MR) and pathological diagnosis. As such it could be used by itself or in combination with these other technologies. The idea has been considered by the International Search Authorities to be novel and inventive and thus, considered to be patentable. Further analyses should be run to improve the predictive values of the test together with an external validation. The scenarios of use will be discussed. Based on this work comprehensive documentation should be available for commercial partners. Through collaboration with a technology transfer institution the potential approaches to commercial companies should be explored before any negociations. The idea could have important social and clinical implications through improved diagnosis of breast cancer given the increasing incidence of this disease in many countries worldwide.

Due to its multidrug resistance (MDR), Enterococcus faecium (Efm) poses a challenge to the healthcare system and renders most standard antibiotics useless. Bacteriophage (phage) therapy has resurfaced as a treatment strategy for bacterial infections due to increasing antibiotic resistance. Its advantages include specificity, low side effects and production costs, especially when used in combination with standard-of-care antibiotics. Phage therapy has been successful in compassionate use, but its wider implementation is hindered by a lack of knowledge on which antibiotics phages synergize and the mechanisms behind remain elusive. Our project is unique in that it aims to enable the use of conventional antibiotics in MDR Efm through phages. We want to explore which antibiotic classes phages synergize with, which survival strategies Efm uses against phages, and how host factors influence the ability of the antibiotic-phage combination to kill Efm. First, we will investigate phages' interaction with different antibiotic classes against Efm. We will explore the dynamics of phage-antibiotic combinations and whether they are additive, synergistic, or antagonistic. Second, potential phage survival strategies of Efm will be investigated. Additionally, membrane vesicles will be investigated as a potential survival strategy against phages, and their ability to act as a decoy and protect the bacterium from phages will be studied. Third, we will investigate the impact of host factors on the phage-antibiotic killing of Efm, to see whether they can enhance or suppress the phage-antibiotic killing. This approach will provide a deeper understanding of the phages-antibiotic interaction against MDR Efm strains, as well as potential survival systems of Efm which may also shed light on possible mitigation strategies. Overall, this approach has the potential to enable the use of standard-of-care drugs against MDR bacterial infections in general.

Mainland Scandinavian (MSc) marks a fascinating linguistic scenario: relying on mutual intelligibility, speakers use their native language (L1) when conversing with foreign MSc-interlocutors and keep doing so even if immersed in the target speech community for years. This raises the question if non-native speakers of a closely related target language (Ln) use different grammars or resort to the L1 grammar when processing the Ln, whether parsing it causes attrition, and if any of this is modulated by exposure. CloReLa (Closely Related Languages: Processing, Attrition and Exposure) addresses these issues by comparing processing and judgment data of native speakers of Norwegian and non-native speakers with L1 Swedish or Danish. To this end, we employ an innovative combination of on- and off-line methods: Eye-Tracking while Reading (ETR) and Acceptability Judgment Tasks (AJT), conducting in-person studies at UiT and collecting data from speakers in Sweden and Denmark via web-based surveys. Considering closely related languages serves to close important knowledge gaps: these exhibit a broader range of contrasts than dialects, no common standard to fall back on and a slowly deteriorating mutual intelligibility. Whether non-native speakers postulate dedicated rules and are more prone to attrition or not has extensive implications for models of the cognitive organisation of linguistic systems and factors affecting their formation. CloReLa emphasizes the potential of closely related varieties and sparks methodological advances by promoting a novel mix of methods to study (un)grammaticality in parsing. The action allows the PI to build on psycholinguistic and theoretical expertise and trains him in ETR and transferable skills, an ideal mix of training-through-research and formal training. In AcqVA Aurora, which excels in research on multilingualism, he will contribute to ongoing projects and take the lead on CloReLa to become a top-class linguist doing cutting-edge research.

In response to the escalating climate crisis, environmental activists are increasingly resorting to radical methods to pressure states into fulfilling their international climate commitments. This marks another chapter in the long history of transnational radical environmentalism. For over half a century, profound dissatisfaction with the consistent failure of states to uphold their international environmental responsibilities has driven some transnational environmental organizations to employ radical tactics in their pursuit of conservation goals. Consequently, these organizations assert that they have successfully halted underground nuclear testing, secured global whale protection, and conserved ecosystems, prompted state revisions of climate policies, and achieved numerous other environmental objectives. While social science and legal scholarship have explored radical environmentalism from various perspectives, the scholarly debate mostly frames it as a social force grappling with the state's ongoing inability to fulfill its environmental promises. This project departs from this state-centric view of radical environmentalism. Utilizing the methods of social science and legal research, along with the theoretical framework of legal pluralism, REMFORCE seeks to uncover whether radical environmentalism of transnational environmental organizations has developed into a normative system of environmental enforcement parallel to the state-centric one. At the time of severe environmental challenges and the unprecedented disruption of the international legal order, REMFORCE aims to reconceptualize our understanding of the radical environmental movement as an auxiliary system of enforcement and provide deeper empirical insight into the role of radical non-state actors in the enforcement of international environmental law.

Microfluidics have become a powerful tool in biotechnology and life sciences, whereas the nanofluidic regime remains widely unused in industry and the clinical environment. Especially protein misfolding diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, recently experience a growing demand for single-molecule detection capabilities, as the assembly process of a single corrupted protein is correlated with its aggregation propensity and spread of the disease. Conventional microfluidic methods to study relevant biomarkers and aggregates involve fluorescent labelling, which alters the samples' properties and puts additional constraints on experimental design. We therefore seek for methods to study macromolecules (in particular: exosomes, oligomers) in a label-free manner in solution without chemically altering their properties. To overcome this limitation, the project combines innovative nanofluidic technology with cutting-edge label-free microscopy techniques. First, hybrid 2-photon lithography is used for the scalable cost-effective nanofabrication of nanofluidic polymer chips. Secondly, these chips are then employed for the detection and sizing of exosomes (<100 nm) and alpha-synuclein protein aggregates (<12 nm) in solution using label-free imaging methods (e.g. QPM and DUVM). The approach presented here, allows protein misfolding researchers to study oligomerization more efficiently by running orders of magnitude more experiments with same already limited material, and greatly increases availability of nanofluidic chips for protein metrology in existing biological laboratories. New expertise, excellence, management skills and scientific training acquired during the action, prepare the researcher for a role as independent dementia research group leader in Europe, using state-of-the-art nanotechnology to establish nanofluidic single-molecule detection of protein aggregates and macromolecules as new golden golden standard in life sciences research.