Horizon 2020

Horizon 2020 is the largest EU Research and Innovation programme in existence, with nearly €80 billion of funding on hand over the course of 7 years (2014 to 2020). Our initiative is to remove hurdles between the lab and the market, to allow for a fluid transition of innovation to the public’s access. What follow are some of our recent endeavors in making the world a more progressive place.

Ebola Vaccine Consortium

There have been 9,936 cases of ebola in 2014, and 4,877 ending in death. Thankfully, A new international consortium,backed by the European Commission, has been launched to help advance research in to a candidate vaccine against Ebola.

Funding is already helping to implement an on-going trial of an Ebola candidate vaccine being carried out in 120 healthy adult volunteers in Lausanne. If the safety and immunogenicity data from this and other on-going phase 1 trials is judged as encouraging, the EU funding will enable the consortium to begin larger phase 2 trials in Africa, which could start as early as January 2015.

Marine Night Project

The Marine Night project delves deeper into the workings of the Arctic polar night to study biodiversity, food chains, interaction and social processes and how they are changing in the wake of climate change. The primary objective of Marine

Night is to achieve a basic understanding of Arctic biodiversity and food web structure during the polar night, and how ecological processes from reproduction and growth to trophic interactions and life-history processes during this nearly unstudied time contribute to the functioning of Arctic ecosystems.

Organic in Horizon

2020

Responsible for passing the legislation for Horizon 2020 in the European Parliament, the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy has been consulting with industry experts to gauge their thoughts on Horizon 2020 and how best to allocate funding within the individual objectives of the pillars. One organization to give evidence was the Italian Association for Organic Agriculture, the AIAB.“I think Horizon 2020 can contribute to new and useful biotech developments, yet other societal needs must be achieved through agronomic ‘classic’ research, social innovation and efficient knowledge-sharing.”

Cristina Micheloni

Aquafit4useIncreasing water sustainability is a key challenge not just for Europe, but the entire planet. Industry accountsfor a significant proportion of water consumption, with estimates

predicting this usage to increase by 50% between 1995 and 2025. Consequently, projects focusing on increasing water efficiency have been a key focus for research funding. Defined as a success story by the European Commission under FP7, the Aquafit4Use project received over two thirds of its total project funding from the EU. The project, which ran from January 2008 to May 2012, focused on helping to increase water sustainability and conservation in the water-intensive industries of paper, food, textiles and chemicals.

Investment to

Newcastle University

The university has been chosen to lead new collaborations, education programmes and projects tackling the challenges facing society posed by an aging population. It is now working with local firms to put together bids for EIT funding, which have to be jointly submitted with a European partner under the new KIC known as EIT Health.

Newcastle University is a key partner in InnoLife, a consortium of 144 European companies, research institutes and universities, selected by the EIT to invest €80m annually into projects tackling demographic change across Europe.