Epigenetic mechanisms allow cells to adjust gene expression in response to environmental cues. Increased understanding of this area has led to excitement about the potential of applying epigenetic regulation to drug discovery. EPIMAC aims to pursue the potential of epigenetics as a novel and innovative therapeutic modality for immuno-inflammatory diseases, in particular Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). IBD is a severe and disabling chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract affecting millions of people worldwide. Current treatment strategies are not successful because the precise etiology unclear. It is increasingly clear that deregulated epigenetic processes are associated with the aberrant inflammatory response seen in IBD. Recent reports suggest that inhibitors of epigenetic modifications developed by GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), such as histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors, bear potential in treating inflammatory states (Nicodeme et al, Nature 2010; Kruidenier et al, Nature 2012). The EPIMAC consortium has the ambition to educate a group of next-generation scientists that master genetics, epigenetics, target discovery, pharmacology, preclinical validation and regulatory issues, and at the same time have a good understanding of clinical implementations of the drug pipeline of our pharmaceutical partner GSK. GSK is one of the world's leading research-based pharmaceutical and healthcare companies that aims to team up with academic partners in EPIMAC through its dedicated discovery performance unit named EpiNova in conjunction with 2 immuno-pharmacology units. An SME specializing in epigenetic compound targeting to inflammatory cells, Chroma Therapeutics, will contribute technology to EPIMAC. EPIMAC will educate and train these scientists by providing them with a versatile and multidisciplinary doctoral program, allowing them to become excellent scientists skilled to overcome the current challenges in IBD.

Balancing between improving population health, delivering quality care for individuals, and containing costs is a timely social/economical challenge in Europe. There is great potential achieving this through healthcare (HC) system performance intelligence optimizing effective use of available HC data in countries. Effective implementation of HC performance intelligence (HPI) by skilled professionals will improve integrated service delivery; patient engagement; equality in access to HC; health outcomes; and reduce waste in HC. Translating HC data into meaningful, valid, actionable performance intelligence that is transferrable into actions to improve HC systems requires multidisciplinary skills & innovative competencies; currently not well developed in training programmes and the scientific community and missing in today’s European HC market. The ETN for HPI Professionals (HealthPros) fills this gap and directly impacts the European Research Area by training innovative “Healthcare Performance Intelligence Professionals” uniting a multidisciplinary consortium tackling private, public, academic sectors.13 ESRs will be trained in multidisciplinary innovative scientific technical and complementary skills, seconded to private / public / academic HC sectors in multiple countries and build relations with potential future employers. 5 ESRs work on PhD projects related to HC performance measurement optimizing the use of available registry and administrative data and applying statistical models to provide actionable input to HC performance management. 4 ESRs work on PhDs to translate performance intelligence into value-creating HC governance mechanisms; 4 ESRs work on PhDs aimed to impact the actual use of performance intelligence by different end-users. ESRs will have unique HC data access.

ESA-ITN will break through the state of the art in sepsis diagnostics and will train 15 early-stage researchers (ESRs) to determine the clinical potency of a variety of new complementary sepsis biomarkers. These cover the full range of the antiinflammatory response in sepsis, at genetic, molecular and cellular level. Rapid and practical biomarker diagnostics for sepsis will be developed by building on some of the world's most innovative diagnostic platforms. In addition, a whole new clinical research model that incorporates use of biomarker diagnostics will be designed and tested. All 15 interlinked ESR projects have an interdisciplinary component (intersection of sepsis research, product development, economics and medical practice) and international (representing 10 countries) and industry collaborations (incorporating 3 diagnostics firms, 1 bioinformatics company and a business school). Interactions within the network are strengthened by meaningful secondments, which take place at private beneficiary or partner institutes. The training programme covers: 1. Specialist training in an international, interdisciplinary and intersectorial sepsis-orientated research project; 2. Advanced technology training in pathogenesis, biomarker discovery, diagnostics, trial design and innovation management; 3. Professional training in transferable skills, including the special ESA-ITN mini-MBA. The setup of ESA-ITN is unique as it reflects the entire innovation value chain for sepsis biomarker diagnostics. ESA-ITN is composed of leading institutes in sepsis research and a selection of Europe's top biomarker diagnostics companies. Links to various global networks and shared research infrastructures in the field of sepsis further leverage the proposition of ESA-ITN.

Our aim is to create, in Europe, an innovative and ambitious multidisciplinary intersectoral joint doctoral training programme, dedicated to Methods in Research on Research (MIROR) in the field of clinical research. “Research on Research”, is an emerging new scientific discipline that aims to reduce waste in research and increase research value. Waste in research represents tens of billions of Euros spent each year on studies that are redundant, flawed in their design, never published or poorly reported. The public is the main victim of this waste and reducing waste and increasing value of research represents a major societal challenge. Our proposal involving 15 early-stage researchers, aims to 1) prepare students for envisioning the future challenges in clinical research and find innovative solutions to face them, 2) train students to go well beyond the state-of-the-art in their research, 3) help students think differently, taking advantage of the multidisciplinary expertise and intercultural diversity of the network, 4) teach students how to move from research to action and convert knowledge and idea into a product, and 5) help students develop skills to match the public and private sector needs and create new professional opportunities. MIROR will bring together 7 world-class research teams in various disciplines (computer sciences, applied mathematics, biostatistics, bioinformatics, clinical epidemiology, psychology, social sciences and translational medicine) from 6 different European countries; 6 non-academic partners involved in diverse sectors, and 4 major academic partners. We will tackle several steps of a clinical research project (planning, conduct, reporting and the peer-review); various study designs (observational studies, randomised trials, systematic reviews); various study questions (therapeutic, diagnostic, and prognostic evaluation) using various methods (meta-epidemiologic studies, qualitative studies, experimental studies, simulations etc).

According to ECDC, over 4 million healthcare-associated infections in the EU cause 37,000 deaths and cost EUR 7 billion/year. Half of them are related to medical devices (i.e., catheters, implants) and 80% of these are related to bacterial biofilms. A recent EC report highlighted the medical device sector’s role in driving EU economic growth, employing 500k people in 25k companies (80% are SMEs) with annual sales of EUR 85 billion. The strategy to prevent medical device-infections is alteration of the device’s surface with antimicrobials. However, current antimicrobial surfaces don’t control bacterial growth in tissue surrounding implants, and only Sterilex® has received regulatory approval in the US as anti-biofilm agent. Participants in this proposal have earlier demonstrated a dramatic in vitro inhibition of biofilm formation by 3D-printing surfaces with antibiotics incorporated into the carrier polymers. This discovery opens new possibilities for printed medical devices that better resist biofilms. Our objective is to set-up a new European education platform to guide and inspire young researchers in the intersectoral exploration of innovative routes to counteract microbial biofilms by fabricating anti-infective, tailored, 3D-printed medical devices. Current opportunities for young researchers to receive an structured, inter-sectoral and up-to-date education on personalized medicine and medical devices are marginal, and to our knowledge PRINT-AID is the first ETN set up for this purpose. State-of-the-art printing technologies will be combined with in vitro and in vivo biofilm models and novel tools for data integration/standardization. Doctoral training will be performed within a high-quality network of 12 participants (5 industrial) from the EU and US. It will include online and face-to-face courses taught by researchers with academic and industrial expertise in biofilms, 3D-printing research, antimicrobials, material science, and drug development.