More than ever, Europe needs cybersecurity. With the constant development of new malicious software, cyberattacks have been on the rise. Due to new attack vectors and encryption, novel attacks are undetectable to humans and simple rules and signatures. Without holistic and interdisciplinary cybersecurity solutions, the citizens’ lives, well-being, money and other assets are at risk. The PERUN project will strengthen the European cybersecurity by providing novel solutions powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, to analyse and counter emerging cyberthreats to software, firmware and hardware in an efficient and cost-effective way. The PERUN project aims to enhance the security and resilience of digital infrastructures - national-level cybersecurity infrastructures, education and research networks, critical energy infrastructures, digital infrastructures of NGOs providing critical services and security operations centers (SOCs) across various sectors - by developing advanced cybersecurity solutions that leverage AI/ML technologies. To this end, PERUN will produce a set of innovative methods and algorithms to analyse data and detect new types of malware, as well as a collection of high TRL tools and products using new scientific approaches, all validated by representatives of the critical sectors. The results will be communicated and disseminated, not only to reach a broad range of stakeholders, but also to raise public awareness of cyberthreats. The tangible results of PERUN will be applied in five real-life scenarios pertaining to critical sectors such as nonprofits, energy, telecommunications, private SOCs and CERTs/CSIRTs. Owing to their high TRL and versatility, they will be an instant boost to Europe’s cybersecurity, whilst increasing its strategic autonomy and technological advantage.

Exposure to inhaled mineral or metallic dust may induce interstitial lung diseases (ILDs) such as sarcoidosis or pulmonary fibrosis. These diseases are frequently considered idiopathic; however, some of them are of occupational or environmental origin. Pathologists do not investigate the nature and the origin of mineral dust exposure by lack of available and convenient technology. Since 2014, Benoit Busser is working with collaborators to develop the medical applications of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), aiming at characterizing the nature of (nano)-particles in different tissue specimens. LIBS technology allows visualizing and quantifying metals and mineral dust in biological organs, and especially in the lungs. LIBS is considered as a major tool to help medical doctors in their investigations for finding origins to idiopathic lung diseases. In the context of the recent funding of our national multidisciplinary project MEDI-LIBS (ANR-17-CE18-0028), very encouraging preliminary results and the enthusiasm of our clinical partners encourage Benoit Busser (coordinator) and his collaborators to push forward and to submit a proposal for an ambitious (but realistic) European project connected to their field of expertise. They aim at creating a high-performance LIBS equipment fully dedicated to biomedical analyses. The EURO-LIBS project is innovative and relies on an international consortium of i) physicists for the construction of the LIBS instrument and training of the users), ii) clinicians for the clinical trials (expertise in pulmonology and/or occupational medicine), iii) and a “business-partner” from the Health insurance field for the economic health studies. The EURO-LIBS project, its objectives and consortium, are perfectly aligned with the scope of the next EIT Health BP 2021 call, in March 2020. The European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) is an integral part of Horizon 2020, the EU’s Framework Programme for Research and Innovation.

HEREDITARY aims to significantly transform the way we approach disease detection, prepare treatment response, and explore medical knowledge by building a robust, interoperable, trustworthy and secure framework that integrates multimodal health data (including genetic data) while ensuring compliance with cross-national privacy-preserving policies. The HEREDITARY framework comprises five interconnected layers, from federated data processing and semantic data integration to visual interaction. By utilizing advanced federated analytics and learning workflows, we aim to identify new risk factors and treatment responses focusing, as exploratory use cases, on neurodegenerative and gut microbiome related disorders. HEREDITARY is harmonizing and linking various sources of clinical, genomic, and environmental data on a large scale. This enables clinicians, researchers, and policymakers to understand these diseases better and develop more effective treatment strategies. HEREDITARY adheres to the citizen science paradigm to ensure that patients and the public have a primary role in guiding scientific and medical research while maintaining full control of their data. Our goal is to change the way we approach healthcare by unlocking insights that were previously impossible to obtain.

Objective: MOODSTRATIFICATION brings together 11 partners (psychiatrists, immunologists, epidemiologists, industry) from 7 countries stratifying patients with a major depressive episode on the basis of leukocyte immune profiles. The immune profiles were found in two previous EU projects, which also delivered the novel concept, that T cell defects with episodes of chronic mild inflammation are a causal factor for a large part of mood disorders. The immune profiles determine therapy choice with (combinations of) conventional and novel therapies with immune modulators (e.g. anti-inflammatory and T cell enforcement therapies). On the basis of recent data we expect that the present poor response rates of about 50% to anti-depressant therapy will improve considerably to 80-90%. Mood disorders are complex diseases with a high prevalence (12-20%) and are the second highest contributor to the number of years lived with disability worldwide. Work plan: MOODSTRATIFICATION firstly uses the large data sets and biobank of the two previous EU projects to further refine the already found immune profiles. Therefore the proposal further integrates existing and newly collected multidimensional, longitudinal clinical and laboratory data (-omics, FACS and serum multi-analytes) from these projects for further immune network analysis and computational modelling also taking female-male differences into account. Technologies to easily determine the immune profiles (a relatively small multi-analyte panel, Q-PCR kits on PAXGENE material) will together with industries be developed. Thereafter the efficacy of two novel T cell enforcing therapeutic approaches and the new concept of depression stratification on the basis of the immune profiles will be validated in three clinical proof-of-principle studies. Various national and international patient associations will be actively involved. Novelty: This is the first lab-based therapy stratification in psychiatry made ready for the clinic.