Alzheimer’s disease (AD) affects more than 7 million people in Europe and this figure is expected to double every 20 years. Despite intensive efforts, no disease-modifying treatments or preventive strategies are available. The lack of specific, sensitive and minimally invasive diagnostics to identify people with early-stage AD to be included in clinical drug intervention trials is among the main reasons for many notable trial failures. The main challenges in developing the required diagnostics are identification of AD biomarkers and development of their detection techniques. The complex and interdisciplinary nature of the research underlines the need for innovative training of a new generation of researchers in the field. BBDiag responds to such a need and establishes a much-needed ETN for blood based early-AD diagnostics to address these challenges. It brings together leading academic and industrial experts from five major consortia in Europe and uses their synergies to build a triple-i research & training platform with the required multidisciplinary expertise and cutting-edge technologies. BBDiag Fellows will be trained under the Vitae Researcher Development Framework innovatively combined with the BBDiag platform for gaining interdisciplinary scientific and transferable skills as well as personal quality, creative thinking and business mind-set. The ETN has a highly innovative research programme for the discovery of AD biomarkers, development of novel biosensing techniques and point of care tools, and for technological exploitation of the diagnostics. These advances will strongly support improved care provision and development of disease-modifying treatments and preventive strategies for AD patients. More importantly, BBDiag will deliver its first generation of 13 highly-skilled, creative and entrepreneurial Fellows, setting them on a path to successful careers in academia or industry to ensure that the medical and societal challenges imposed by AD are met.

Six TSOs, eleven research partners, together with sixteen industry (manufacturers, solution providers) and market (producers, ESCo) players address, through a holistic approach, the identification and development of flexibilities required to enable the Energy Transition to high share of renewables. This approach captures synergies across needs and sources of flexibilities, such as multiple services from one source, or hybridizing sources, thus resulting in a cost-efficient power system. OSMOSE proposes four TSO-led demonstrations (RTE, REE, TERNA and ELES) aiming at increasing the techno-economic potential of a wide range of flexibility solutions and covering several applications, i.e.: synchronisation of large power systems by multiservice hybrid storage; multiple services provided by the coordinated control of different storage and FACTS devices; multiple services provided by grid devices, large demand-response and RES generation coordinated in a smart management system; cross-border sharing of flexibility sources through a near real-time cross-border energy market. The demonstrations are coordinated with and supported by simulation-based studies which aim (i) to forecast the economically optimal mix of flexibility solutions in long-term energy scenarios (2030 and 2050) and (ii) to build recommendations for improvements of the existing market mechanisms and regulatory frameworks, thus enabling the reliable and sustainable development of flexibility assets by market players in coordination with regulated players. Interoperability and improved TSO/DSO interactions are addressed so as to ease the scaling up and replication of the flexibility solutions. A database is built for the sharing of real-life techno-economic performances of electrochemical storage devices. Activities are planned to prepare a strategy for the exploitation and dissemination of the project’s results, with specific messages for each category of stakeholders of the electricity system.