The Work Programme 2018-2020 of Horizon 2020 was launched by the European Commission today.

Horizon 2020 is the largest multinational programme dedicated to research & innovation and it is "open to the world". This means that researchers, universities, research organisations, companies and non-governmental organisations from across the globe can apply to participate in the activities of the Work Programme carried out mainly through calls for proposals.

For your information and further dissemination, please check the EC Press Release.

If you are interested to apply, consult the Horizon 2020 participant portal. The detailed topic descriptions, call conditions and budget information for any of these calls can be found there.

If you have any questions regarding the 2018 calls or if you are looking for support in view of submitting a Horizon2020 project in 2018, do not hesitate to contact us. SCIPROM will be happy to support you from your first idea to the final project report and be on your side all along the project duration.

Sources: EC, Euresearch

ERC Consolidator Grants are designed to support excellent Principal Investigators at the career stage at which they are consolidating their own independent research team.

Up to €2 mio are available for projects of up to 5 years duration.

The call closes on 15 February 2018.

The mandatory templates are available from the Participant Portal once having registered for the call.

For more information, please consult the ERC website.

Sources: Euresearch, ERC

The Innovative Medicines Initiative has just published the final review of the IMI1programme, and the mid-term review of IMI2.

The experts conclude that IMI programme ‘remains relevant and justified’ and that ‘positive contributions on the drug development process have been realised’. Positive points recognised in the reports include:
- the IMI role in the creation of collaborative research networks that have enhanced trust between partners from different sectors, and triggered a mind shift as partners came to understand each other’s needs;
- the quality of the research emerging from IMI projects;
- the creation of important resources and tools for drug development, some of which are already being used by researchers in their daily work.

The reports also note that 90% of the people who responded to the online survey agreed that the EU should cooperate with industry in the context of a public-private partnership on health.

Suggestions for improvement concern performance indicators, increasing the involvement of SMEs as well as dissemination and communication of the projects' results.

Read the European Commission's press release on the evaluation

Read the new IMI brochure on results and impacts

Source: IMI

The European Commission is currently making public the draft work programmes 2018-2020 for most of the thematic programmes in Horizon 2020. These drafts are available before their adoption to provide potential participants with the currently expected main lines of the work programmes. The remaining drafts are expected to be released this week.

Please note that they are still in a DRAFT version and as such have not been adopted or endorsed by the European Commission. Any views expressed are the views of the Commission services and may not in any circumstances be regarded as stating an official position of the Commission.

The adoption of the work programme will be announced on the Horizon 2020 website and on the Participant Portal towards end of October 2017. Only the adopted work programmes will have legal value. Information and topic descriptions indicated in these drafts may not appear in the final work programme; and likewise, new elements may be introduced at a later stage.

More information and links to the draft work programmes can be found on the EC website.

Sources: EC, Euresearch

Jacques Dubochet of Switzerland's University of Lausanne has been awarded this year’s Nobel prize in chemistry together with two other scientists from Britain and the United States.

Announcing the winners on Wednesday, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the three scientists helped develop cryo-electron microscopy - a method to have detailed images of life’s complex machineries in atomic resolution.

Dubochet, born in 1942, is a honorary professor of biophysics at Lausanne University and worked at Basel and Geneva Universities.

IMI 2 has just published a list of indicative topics for the call 13 which is foreseen to be launched before the end of the year.

The following topics are under consideration for inclusion in future IMI calls for proposals:

- Assessment of the uniqueness of diabetic cardiomyopathy relative to other forms of heart failure using unbiased pheno-mapping approaches
- Genome-environment interactions in inflammatory skin disease
- The value of diagnostics to combat antimicrobial resistance by optimising antibiotic use
- Mitochondrial dysfunction in neurodegeneration
- Support and coordination action for the projects of the neurodegeneration area of the Innovative Medicines Initiative
- A sustainable European induced pluripotent stem cell platform
- Linking digital assessment of mobility to clinical endpoints to drive regulatory acceptance and clinical practice
- Human tumour microenvironment immunoprofiling
- CONCEPTION - continuum of evidence from pregnancy exposures, reproductive toxicology and breastfeeding to improve outcomes now
- Improving the preclinical prediction of adverse effects of pharmaceuticals on the nervous system
- Translational safety biomarker pipeline (TRANSBIOLINE): enabling development and implementation of novel safety biomarkers in clinical trials and diagnosis of disease
- Federated and privacy-preserving machine learning in support of drug discovery
- Pilot programme on a clinical compound bank for repurposing. This programme includes the following topics: Cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, Respiratory diseases, Neurodegenerative diseases and Rare/orphan diseases

Source: IMI2