Eu res 05 digital mag by Blazon Publishing and Media Ltd

EU Research Vol: 2014 Issue 1

THE HEALTH OF THE PLANET Spotlight on Sustainable Development International Healthcare Focus Research Funding in Ireland: Insight from Professor Mark Ferguson

Follow EU Research on www.twitter.com/EU_RESEARCH

Editor’s No A t times of austerity it can often seem like the only option is to draw your horns in and wait till the storm passes. The roots of future prosperity are often sown during the hard times though, and with the economic winds beginning to change, we’ve spent some time in Ireland speaking to researchers and key figures in science funding.

The country has of course been through a lot over the last ten years. After the euphoria of the construction boom, and the talk of the ‘Celtic Tiger’, Ireland suffered a severe financial crisis and had to be bailed out by the European Union, which had knock-on effects throughout the public sector.

Martin Brodie runs his own media and communications company, after a career in journalism and public relations. After starting his journalist career on the Bristol Evening Post , Martin joined Rolls-Royce plc in Bristol in1980 and held a number of senior communications positions in the defence and civil aerospace businesses before moving to the group’s corporate headquarters in 1991. From then until his retirement in 2009, Martin was responsible for much of the Group’s international communications and was also involved in UK national media relations throughout this period. His last role was Head of Communications – Europe Middle East and Africa. His previous roles also included responsibility for engineering and technology, during which he was editor of the first Rolls-Royce environment report, Powering a Better World.

www.euresearcher.com

This hasn’t led to a decrease in Ireland’s commitment to scientific research though. While no area of the public sector can be immune to funding constraints, the Irish Government has maintained its commitment to science, with Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) using its annual budget of €150 million to fund cutting-edge research. A country the size of Ireland can’t compete directly with the major global economies when it comes to R & D, so SFI targets key sectors which it believes will bring the maximum economic and societal benefit. These are biotechnology, ICT and energy, all areas that are crucial to our economic future. This edition is packed full of news and insightful features on cuttingedge projects across these and many others. Scientific research is crucial to addressing the major challenges we face, and by funding both exploratory and applied research, Ireland is building for a more sustainable economic future. Hope you enjoy the issue.

Martin Brodie

Contents 4 Research News

EU Research’s Richard Davey takes a look at current events in the scientific news

10 BioSHaRe

Professor Ronald Stolk and BioSHaRE.eu project manager Lisette Giepmans tell us about their work to develop harmonised measures and standardised computing infrastructures

13 Generating Blood-

Based Diagnosis for Alzheimer Disease Neuronal disorders are marked by changes in blood values, which can be used to improve diagnosis. We spoke to Dr Eugenia Wang about her research into developing a blood test to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease

16 Algebraic Geometric

Approaches to Biological Complexity Researchers need sophisticated mathematical methods to understand how such complex networks process information, as Dr Jeremy Gunawardena, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School explains

19 Nanoelectroablation Nanoelectroablation is a completely new approach to treating tumors that triggers apoptosis, the tumor cell’s own programmed cell death pathway. Once triggered, the tumor slowly shrinks and is scavenged by the immune system, initiating an innate immune response that attacks other tumors in mice, writes Dr Richard Nuccitelli of BioElectroMed Corp

22 GAMBA

We spoke to Professor Christian Plank of the GAMBA project about their work in developing a geneactivated matrix platform for tissue repair and how it could improve treatment of the condition

26 Science

Foundation Ireland We met Professor Mark Ferguson, Director General of Science Foundation Ireland and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Ireland, at his Dublin office to discuss the SFI’s investment strategy and the wider importance of scientific research

30 MEAD-ET

Dr Carol Howell and Dr Susan Sandeman tell us about research within the MEADET and ACROBAT projects using a range of advanced, synthetically derived activated carbons with tailored surface properties and porosity to address a range of pressing healthcare challenges

33 TRAIN-ASAP TRAIN-ASAP is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network dedicated to the scientific and professional training of 12 young scientists in this area. The goal is to train the next generation of scientists able to bring new antimicrobial products to the market

36 STOP

We spoke to Dr Paramala Santosh of the STOP study about their work to develop a set of web-based instruments to track suicidality over time

40 Investment and

Development Agency, Ireland We spoke to Brendan McDonagh, Manager of the Business Intelligence Unit at Ireland’s Investment and Development Agency (IDA) about their strategy to attract new investment into Ireland

EU Research

EU Research Vol: 2014 Issue 1

THE HEALTH OF THE PLANET Spotlight on Sustainable Development International Healthcare Focus Research Funding in Ireland: Insight from Professor Mark Ferguson

Follow EU Research on www.twitter.com/EU_RESEARCH

EDITORIAL

42 CentraLab

Dr Mojca Gabrovšek of the CentraLab project tells us about their work to develop an online ecosystem for territorial innovation

45 FORGE

We spoke to Dr Richard P. Shaw of the FORGE project about this including their research into the behaviour of gases in and around these repositories, work which has important safety implications

48 PESTOLIVE

Thierry Mateille, senior scientist at IRD and coordinator of the PESTOLIVE project, tells us about their work in developing new ecological approaches to manage soil-borne parasites, which will also help reduce the use of pesticides

49 SINGLEOUT The SINGLEOUT project aims to develop a measurement device for single microwave photons. This work could be an important step towards quantum information processing and other practical applications, as project coordinator Doctor Mikko Möttönen explains

52 PLEASURE

We spoke to Bianca Pop, dissemination manager of the PLEASURE project about their unique new approach to address this challenge from the processing side instead of using subsitutes or replacers

53 Sustainable Practices Research Group

Professor Dale Southerton of the ESRC, Defra and Scottish Government funded Sustainable Practices Research Group tells us about their research into how social practices emerge and how they can be changed.

Managing Editor Martin Brodie info@euresearcher.com Deputy Editor Patrick Truss patrick@euresearcher.com Deputy Editor Richard Davey rich@euresearcher.com Science Writer Holly Cave www.hollycave.co.uk Acquisitions Editor Elizabeth Sparks info@euresearcher.com PRODUCTION Production Manager Jenny O’Neill jenny@euresearcher.com Production Assistant Tim Smith info@euresearcher.com Art Director Daniel Hall design@euresearcher.com Design Manager David Patten design@euresearcher.com Illustrator Martin Carr mary@twocatsintheyard.co.uk PUBLISHING Managing Director Edward Taberner etaberner@euresearcher.com Scientific Director Dr Peter Taberner info@euresearcher.com Office Manager Janis Beazley info@euresearcher.com Finance Manager Adrian Hawthorne info@euresearcher.com Account Manager Jane Tareen jane@euresearcher.com

EU Research Blazon Publishing and Media Ltd 131 Lydney Road, Bristol, BS10 5JR, United Kingdom T: +44 (0)207 193 9820 F: +44 (0)117 9244 022 E: info@euresearcher.com www.euresearcher.com © Blazon Publishing June 2010

Cert o n.TT-COC-2200

www.euresearcher.com

RESEARCH

NEWS

EU Research’s Richard Davey takes a look at current events in the scientific news

New ERC Chief Ready to Defend Fundamental Basic Science Today, the European Commission announced that French mathematician Jean-Pierre Bourguignon has been appointed the new president of the European Research Council (ERC), the European Union’s main funding agency for basic research. Bourguignon, who will formally start on 1 January, comes to the agency just at the start of Horizon 2020, the European Union’s new 7-year research program, in which ERC sees its budget increase to about €13 billion, or almost €2 billion annually. That’s almost double its budget under Horizon 2020’s 7-year predecessor, which ends this month. Bourguignon retired in August after 19 years at the helm of the Institute of Advanced Scientific Studies, a private institute near Paris; he has also been a fellow at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research for the past 45 years. Bourguignon stated “I’ve worked to better organize science at the European level and I feel that European science needs a strong voice. If you ask scientists what the greatest success for science in the European Union is, many will say: the ERC. So being involved in that was very natural to me.” Jean-Pierre Bourguignon Make sure you vist us on our website www.euresearcher.com. For more information regarding any of your dissemination needs please contact us on info@euresearcher.com

Scientists rewrite Genome

Vitamin supplements: No Clear Benefit and could be harmful Evidence from studies of almost half a million people suggested that “supplementing the diet of well-nourished adults... has no clear benefit and might even be harmful”, despite one in three Britons taking vitamins or mineral pills.

Scientists from Yale and Harvard have recoded the entire genome of an organism and improved a bacterium’s ability to resist viruses, a dramatic demonstration of the potential of rewriting an organism’s genetic code. “This is the first time the genetic code has been fundamentally changed,” said Farren Isaacs, assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale and co-senior author of the research published Oct. 18 in the journal Science. “Creating an organism with a new genetic code has allowed us to expand the scope of biological function in a number of powerful ways.” The creation of a genomically recoded organism raises the possibility that researchers might be able to retool nature and create potent new forms of proteins to accomplish a myriad purposes — from combating disease to generating new classes of materials. The research — headed by Isaacs and co-author George Church of Harvard Medical School — is a product of years of studies in the emerging field of synthetic biology, which seeks to re-design natural biological systems for useful purposes. In this case, the researchers changed fundamental rules of biology.

The conclusions were drawn by academics from the University of Warwick and the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, the US, and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The scientists also suggested that companies selling supplements were fuelling false health anxieties to offer unnecessary cures. Three research papers helped inform their opinion. One, analysing 24 previous trials involving 450,000 people, found no beneficial effect on mortality from taking vitamins. Another examined 6,000 elderly men and found no improvement on cognitive decline after 12 years of taking supplements, while a third saw no advantage of supplements among 1,700 men and women with heart problems over an average study of five years. Edgar Miller, of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, said: “There are some that advocate we have many nutritional deficiencies in our diet. The truth is though we are in general overfed, our diet is completely adequate. These vitamins should not be used for chronic disease prevention. Enough is enough. They said that an average Western diet is sufficient to provide the necessary vitamins the body needs. In response to these findings The Health Food Manufacturers’ Association has stated “vitamin supplements provided people with “nutritional insurance”.

EU Research

Horizon 2020 launched with €15 billion over first two years The European Commission has today for the first time presented calls for projects under Horizon 2020, the European Union’s €80 billion research and innovation programme. Worth more than €15 billion over the first two years, the funding is intended to help boost Europe’s knowledge-driven economy, and tackle issues that will make a difference in people’s lives. This includes 12 areas that will be a focus for action in 2014/2015, including topics such as personalised healthcare, digital security and smart cities. European Research, Innovation and Science Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn said: “It’s time to get down to business. Horizon 2020 funding is vital for the future of research and innovation in Europe, and will contribute to growth, jobs and a better quality of life. We have designed Horizon 2020 to produce results, and we have slashed red tape to make it easier to participate. So I am calling on researchers, universities, businesses including SMEs, and others to sign up!” For the first time, the Commission has indicated funding priorities over two years, providing researchers and businesses with more certainty than ever before on the direction of EU research policy. Most calls from the 2014 budget are already open for submissions as of today, with more to follow over the course of the year. Calls in the 2014 budget alone are worth around €7.8 billion, with funding focused on the three key pillars of Horizon 2020:

• Excellent Science: Around €3 billion, including €1.7 billion for grants from the European Research Council for top scientists and €800 million for Marie Curie fellowships for younger researchers • Industrial Leadership: €1.8 billion to support Europe’s industrial leadership in areas like ICT, nanotechnologies, advanced manufacturing, robotics, biotechnologies and space. • Societal challenges: €2.8 billion for innovative projects addressing Horizon 2020’s seven societal challenges, broadly: health; agriculture, maritime and bioeconomy; energy; transport; climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials; reflective societies; and security. The funding opportunities under Horizon 2020 are set out in work programmes published on the EU’s digital portal for research funding, which has been redesigned for quicker, paperless procedures. Participants will also find simpler programme architecture and funding, a single set of rules, and a reduced burden from financial controls and audits. The 2014-15 calls include €500 million over two years dedicated to innovative small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) through a brand new SME Instrument. Gender aspects are expected to be included in many of the projects, and there is funding to further stimulate debate on science’s role within society. There are also new rules to make ‘open access’ a requirement for Horizon 2020, so that publications of project results are freely accessible to all.

Building a face Our lab want to understand how cells move in a developing embryo. In particular, cells that produce all of the structure of the face including the bones, cartilage, and muscle first appear on the dorsal side of the embryo and have to move all the way to the ventral side to make the face. Without these cells that are called cranial neural crest cells, the face of an individual would have a brain and eyes surrounded by skin. These cells have evolved together with the vertebrate animals (All animals that have a back bone). When the cells do not move to the right place in humans, it leads to death of the embryo in the most severe cases or to craniofacial defects with various severity (Cleft lip or palates are the most common example). Our lab uses Frog embryos (Which are vertebrate), as a model to study how these cells can move. Since the embryo develops outside of the mother from a large number of eggs, it is easy to manipulate the expression of genes to see how each of these genes participates in cell migration. Work performed for over a century on frogs has shown that many essential function are conserved with humans and that the role of multiple genes is also the same in human embryos.

www.euresearcher.com

Thus our understanding of neural crest cell migration is based on many studies using frogs, fish, chicken and mice. Our lab focuses on proteins that are present at the surface of CNC and that help the cell interact with the environment during migration. In particular we study the role of cell surface metalloproteases (enzymes that cut other proteins) called ADAM.

Mechanism of Cranial Neural crest cell migration http://people.umass.edu/~alfandar/ Dr Dominique Alfandari Ph.D, Associate Professor, Molecular and Cellular Developmental Biology. Associate Director of the Molecular and Cellular Biology graduate program. University of Massachusetts, Amherst Department of Veterinary and animal sciences. E: alfandar@vasci.umass.edu ISB rm 427B Funded by NIH/ NIDCR Grant no. (NIH) DE016289.

This represents a multiple graft. The green cells express the fluorescent protein GFP and lack several ADAM proteins. The red cells express the fluorescent protein RFP and have ADAM. When grafted into a host embryos cells lacking ADAM can follow wild-type cells. Undergraduate Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC, Paris, France), Biochemistry 1984 to 1988. 1993 PhD developmental Biology UPMC. Post doc University of Virginia (USA). 1996-2003 Maitre de Conference UPMC. 2003-2013 Associate Professor University of Massachusetts Amherst (USA).

Motivating Rehabilitation Through Virtual Reality Games The goal of the research is to understand how persons with mobility impairments navigate and experience presence and motivation in immersive virtual reality (VR) games for physical rehabilitation. VR games aim to engage the user’s senses (e.g., with 3D graphics, 3D audio, and 3D user interfaces) and enable users to perform rehabilitation exercises (e.g., practice walking in good form) as part of an immersive game. VR games have been shown to enhance motivation, which is a major factor in successful rehabilitation. However, there are many unanswered basic science questions Virtual reality rehabilitation game

about how persons with mobility impairments navigate in virtual reality and how this affects their experience of presence - the user’s level of involvement or the feeling of ‘being there’ in the virtual environment (VE). To address this, we have performed empirical studies to investigate how to enable accessible navigation for mobility impaired persons in VR and understand the impact on presence. Although researchers have been empirically studying presence for over 15 years, they have typically only studied it in persons without disabilities. Thus, it is still unknown whether current research results will hold true for persons with mobility impairments. Our working hypothesis was that many of the previous research results may not hold true for persons with mobility impairments, (e.g., stroke, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s). Many of these individuals have sensory deficits (e.g., numbness in legs and feet) and use assistive devices (e.g., canes, walkers, wheelchairs) that impact the way they navigate through VR (i.e. accessibility). Thus, we studied how these differences could affect their experience of presence, which could potentially have an impact on motivation in rehabilitation.

(Presence and Navigation in Virtual Reality Rehabilitation Games for Mobility Impaired Persons) Funded through EAGER NSF award: IIS-1153229 John Quarles PhD Department of Computer Science University of Texas at San Antonio One UTSA Circle San Antonio, TX 78249 USA

Dr John Quarles is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the department of computer science. Dr Quarles is both a virtual reality researcher and a multiple sclerosis patient, which gives his research a unique perspective on improving the quality of life of disabled persons.

http://save.cs.utsa.edu

Exciting results from gene therapy trial A trial into using gene therapy to improve people’s sight has produced exciting results. The technique, used by surgeons in Oxford to treat people who would otherwise have gone blind, involved reviving light-detecting cells in the eye by inserting a gene. The patients in the trial had all been suffering from deteriorating sight for a period of time, with some suffering from a rare genetic condition called choroideremia, which causes progressive loss of vision. The operation has so far had very positive results, with patients reporting improved vision and colour sight, helping them retain their independence and boosting their quality of life. The technique has so far been tried only on people suffering from rare genetic conditions like choroideremia, but Professor Robert McLaren, who led the research, believes it could in time be used to treat more common causes of deteriorating vision. “The mechanisms of chloroideremia and what we are trying to do with the treatment would broadly be applicable to more common causes of blindness,” he told the BBC.

Bee Friendly Researchers at the University of Sussex have created an experimental garden to put pollinator-friendly plants to the test. The team counted the number of insects visiting the plants in their garden. They say their findings show that insect-friendly plants are just as pretty, cheap and easy to grow as less pollinator-friendly varieties. Their results are published in the Journal of Functional Ecology. PhD student Mihail Garbuzov used 32 different varieties of popular garden plants. These included some nectar-rich and highly scented plants he thought would be attractive to insects and some that seemed to be less attractive. While the small-scale study did not produce an exhaustive list of the best plants for pollinating insects, the team says the data has put a number on just how many more pollinators the right plants can attract.

EU Research

Alzheimer substance may be useful Nanomaterial Amyloid proteins are associated with Neurodegenerative diseases, but they also have characteristics that may lead to the development of new composite materials for the electronics industry. Amyloids – variants of proteins that occur naturally in the body – react to multiphoton irradiation and the result could be used as a building block for future nanomaterials. Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology say that, along with enabling nano-processors and storage devices, these materials may even help to make objects invisible. “It is possible to create these protein aggregates in a laboratory”, says researcher Piotr Hanczyc. “By combining them with other molecules, one could create materials with unique characteristics.” The amyloids are shaped like discs piled upon each other. When a material gets merged with these discs, its molecules end up so densely and regularly placed that they can communicate and exchange information. By attaching a material’s molecules to the amyloid, its characteristics change. According to Hanczyc: “This opens up new possibilities to change the nature of the material attached to the amyloids.” Hanczyc also believes that scientists may be able to use the material properties of amyloid fibrils in research on invisible meta materials. “An object’s ability to reflect light could be altered so that what’s behind it gets reflected instead of the object itself, in principle changing the index of light refraction. Kind of like when light hits the surface of water,” he concluded.

Sustainable Mediterranean Practices The sustainable treatment and use of agricultural wastes (AW), is becoming a strong issue for the Mediterranean countries. It is therefore necessary to test their appropriateness and define the specific terms and conditions for their application on different Med crops taking into account different environmental conditions. Although zeolites have shown very good properties and benefits for agriculture, they have not received wide acceptance and application mainly because of the lack of specific guidelines and application practices and of an integrated scenario for their use. The overall objective of the ARIDWASTE project is to investigate, set up and finally develop alternative low cost and environmentally friendly agricultural practices across the Mediterranean basin with the use of treated and untreated agricultural wastes by recycling nutrients and water from treated agricultural wastes taking also advantage of the beneficial, unique properties of natural zeolites. ARIDWASTE will provide a practical understanding of how different intensive crop production systems can successfully adopt suitable AW application practices and address the challenges and possibilities of AW management.

www.aridwaste.gr

ARIDWASTE: Development of Specific Agricultural Practices with the use of Recycled Wastes Suitable for Intensively Cultivated Mediterranean Areas Under Degradation Risk

U.S. Supreme Court consider climate change The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a case that could have broader implications in the effort to fight climate change Last June, the Obama Administration announced an ambitious series of measures to reduce climate-changing carbon emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) enacted stricter rules for cars and new power plants and is working on developing new standards for existing coal-fired power plants. Opponents say the EPA is over-reaching its authority to regulate carbon emissions. The case focuses on a single, narrow question: does the EPA’s authority to limit emissions from new cars and trucks give it the authority to issue permits for power plant construction or modification? Scott Segal, who directs the industry trade group the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council (ERCC), says the requirements for pollution controls on vehicles should not be applied to the permitting process for power plants, factories and other stationary sources of emissions. Segal states “It has always been extremely controversial for the agency to condition the granting of these permits on new requirements, and what the Agency has done has created some confusion of whether they will condition future permits on carbon controls”.

program at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “So even though there is a case before the Supreme Court, we have mostly won this question of EPA authority,” Doniger said. He notes Congress has failed in recent years to create climate laws and stresses that the case before the court focuses on permits only. It is not a challenge to established rules under the Clean Air Act that Congress passed in 1970, the same year the EPA was created. “It’s like a defence shield against new pollution problems,” Doniger said, “and it’s EPA’s job to carry that law out even if the current Congress doesn’t like it. Until Congress can harness a majority to strengthen or repeal the Clean Air Act, the law stands and is binding and enforceable under the Environmental Protection Agency’s mandate”. A decision in the case is expected by June.

The case now before the Supreme Court won’t change those earlier decisions, according to David Doniger, who directs the climate policy

www.euresearcher.com

Study uncovers ‘brain doping’ evidence

US research points to benefits of caffeine Many of us swear by the regenerative properties of our caffeine fix, now researchers in the US suggest that it could boost long-term memory as well. Scientists at John Hopkins University in Baltimore studied a group of 44 volunteers’ ability to distinguish between a series of images that they viewed over the course of two days. In the first part of the study the volunteers, who had all abstained from any coffee for at least a day, were shown a series of images of everyday items and asked to identify whether they were normally found indoors or outdoors. After completing the task each volunteer was randomly assigned either a caffeine pill or a placebo. On the next day the volunteers viewed more images - some the same as the previous day, some similar but subtly different, some completely new. They were then asked to distinguish between them accordingly.The caffeine and placebo groups performed the same, except in identifying which images were similar but slightly different to those they’d previously viewed, where the caffeine group scored around 10 per cent higher.

A year since Lance Armstrong confessed to using performanceenhancing drugs during each of his seven Tour de France ‘wins’, a study suggests that stimulants are widely used at the amateur level of sport as well to enhance both mental and physical performance. Researchers in Germany found that 15 per cent of recreational triathletes admitted to ‘brain doping’, using prescription medicines that would help them focus, while 13 per cent said they used banned substances like steroids or human growth hormone to boost performance. The study is based on the responses of almost 3,000 triathletes taking part in events in Germany, with 15.1 per cent saying they had used products like amphetamines, or medicines like modafinil or methylphenidate. This is of course not entirely new. During the second world war the armed forces on both sides used amphetamines to stay alert and reduce pain, and many drugs have been developed to improve cognitive function, attention and memory. These drugs are now being used outside the patient groups for which they were originally intended. With some now finding their way onto the sporting landscape, the anti-doping authorities may have another set of issues to deal with.

“What I’ve taken from this is that I should keep drinking my coffee,” neuroscientist Michael Yassa, who led the study, told the Guardian. “Our study suggests there’s a real learning and memory benefit, but other studies suggest caffeine is associated with increased longevity and a resistance to Alzheimer’s disease. In moderate amounts, it could have beneficial effects for health.”

North Pole shifting due to climate change The location of the North Pole is beginning to change due to climate change. Researchers from the University of Texas have suggested that climate change is causing the North Pole to drift, which is triggering the axis of the earth to alter. The research team has found that as climate change causes ice sheets and glaciers to melt - due to the warming of the earth caused by trapped greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - the location of the North Pole alters. Although the location on the North Pole has been found to be altering each year since observations first began in 1899, climate change is adding its own factor to the movement. The North Pole has moved around ten centimetres south every year since 1899. This is due to changes in the mass distribution of the Earth as a result of the Earth’s crust rebounding following the last ice age. However, the research found that the shift of the North Pole altered quite dramatically in 2005. Rather than moving along

longitude 70 degrees west every year, the pole began to shift eastwards. Since 2005 the pole has moved around 1.2 metres, reports New Scientist. The researchers used information garnered by NASA’s GRACE satellite, which tracks any changes in the gravity field of the Earth over a number of years. With this data the researchers measured the impact that the melting of the Antarctic and Greenland glaciers and ice sheets, and the subsequent increase in sea levels, on the redistribution of mass across the surface of the Earth. It was found that the biggest contributing factor to the North Pole’s shift in location was the melting of Greenland’s ice sheets. According to Jianli Chen, senior research scientists at the University of Texas, the change in sea level due to the melting of ice in these regions could explain around 90 per cent of the pole’s shift eastward. He continued to say that climate change was the main factor in the melting of the ice.

EU Research

Cheap space flights from Canary Islands planned Swiss Space Systems (S3), a European group of companies, is hoping to “democratise access to space” by launching flights from a base outside a beach resort on Gran Canaria.

our suborbital shuttle for passengers,” said spokesman Grégoire Loretan. “The first flights will be done in 2020, and in the longer term we will propose suborbital flights for the general public.

The flights are due to start in 2020 and are being designed to be as cheap as possible, with the space shuttle detaching from an Airbus A300 aircraft six miles above Earth. Six people will then be flown 60 miles further before returning to Earth.

“The goal is not tourism rather a high speed suborbital transport mode for everybody.”

S3 is also launching Zero G - zero gravity - flights from the Canaries in 2014 but has its headquarters in Switzerland, where the shuttle will be assembled and initial tests will begin in 2017. “After that, our goal is to propose manned flight after having modified

The craft would be reused for each journey, in the same way that an ordinary airline operates, and the shuttle will use standard fuels, meaning it will cost less. The group has yet to decide what the price of a ticket will be, but said it selected Gran Canaria because of its tourist industry and its location in the Atlantic Ocean, away from populated areas.

HURDLES TO INNOVATION STIFLE GROWTH OF BIOTECHNOLOGY IN EUROPE Industrial biotechnology will allow the bio-based industry to grow and contribute to a competitive European economy. Nonetheless, despite this potential, there are still many hurdles which are currently stifling its development in Europe. Most of these hurdles have an impact in many different business areas. The BIO-TIC project was launched with a vision to identify these hurdles and find solutions to overcome them. Funded by the European Commission, BIO-TIC seeks to define product segments and applications that promise significant potential for Europe’s bio-based industry by 2030. BIO-TIC has already established 5 major “bio-business cases” which have the potential to be competitive and introduce cross-cutting technology ideas to biotech innovation. These are: bioplastics (PHA and PLA), chemical building blocks, biofuels, biosurfactants and CO2-based chemicals. The project will publish a roadmap in July 2015 to present its conclusions and provide a concrete action plan by which the hurdles identified in the project can be overcome. But even at this point in time, BIO-TIC is working on actions to overcome the identified hurdles.

www.euresearcher.com

BIO-TIC http://www.industrialbiotecheurope.eu/

One of the key hurdles affecting almost all biobased products is a fragmentation of expertise and knowledge. The BIO-TIC Partnering Platform has been established to overcome this barrier. It is a free online information and communication service, developed by the BIO-TIC project, which provides access to thousands of companies, universities, research institutions and other stakeholders from the European bio-based community. Joining the BIO-TIC network gives users access to information on the current funding programmes, projects, job opportunities and more. They are also able to present their expertise to the international bioeconomy community and promote their products and services to more than 2000 listed organisations. To read more about the activities of BIO-TIC visit www. industrialbiotech-europe.eu. For any questions send an email to bio-tic@europabio.org.

Antoine Peeters is Manager for Industrial Biotechnology and EU Projects at EuropaBio. Antoine works alongside EuropaBio’s Industrial Biotechnology Council Members to create a stable long-term coherent policy framework for biobased industries and to raise political and public awareness and acceptance of industrial biotechnology. Contact : bio-tic@europabio.org

Online Partnering Platform: http://www.industrial-biotechnology.eu/biotic/home Linked-In Group: http://tinyurl.com/BIOTIC-Linkedin

Pooling data from large population-based biobanks allows researchers to study complex diseases, but common variables need to be established before information can be shared. Professor Ronald Stolk and BioSHaRE.eu project manager Lisette Giepmans tell us about their work to develop harmonised measures and standardised computing infrastructures

Pooling data to get to the roots of disease The

world’s biobanks hold vast amounts of valuable medical information that researchers can use to investigate the root causes of disease. However, while data is currently mainly used within an individual biobank, sharing data more widely could give researchers a wider perspective on causes and risk factors for disease. Researchers who want to study the causes of complex diseases and geneenvironment interactions need large numbers of participants, which is currently beyond the scope of most individual biobanks. Data sharing, more specifically data pooling, is therefore essential for these types of studies, a context in which the work of the BioSHaRE project takes on real importance. “The BioSHaRE project aims to enable datasharing between biobanks. An important tool for this is a searchable website with all study catalogues where researchers can find which biobank contains specific data. One of our aims is to establish an overview of the existing biobanks; what information do they gather and to what level of detail?” outlines Project Manager Lisette Giepmans. Before data can be pooled they must be 10

made comparable (harmonized). Researchers in the project are working to enable harmonization of study data and to develop a secure environment for central statistical analysis of locally stored individual data. Biobanks typically use their own questionnaires and hold data in different formats, an issue which researchers need to consider when pooling it. “When you pool the data you need to

example standard alcoholic drink) and the data can be analysed from the individual level data, and in real time. The analyses can be done more flexibly and more efficiently by a single investigator from a central computer. A lot of work has already been done in these areas, with BioSHaRE building on the DataSHAPER harmonization platform, initially developed by the

These biobanks include data on everybody – so if you can pool it effectively you get a huge resource of information. The big advantage of population-based biobanks compared to any other form of research is that it’s real life data – you don’t have to interpret the research to make it applicable to the population harmonize it first and provide a secure system to share it. The available data is transferred into a new common variable through an algorithm written specifically for each biobank,” says Ms Giepmans. The big advantage over the traditional metaanalysis is twofold: the variables from the different biobanks are translated or harmonized into common variables (for

Public Population Project in Genomics (P3G) in Canada. The project is also working on the Opal and Mica applications, software designed by the OBiBA initiative and the OICR in Canada to enable data sharing, Molgenis for genetic data, and the DataSHIELD application for secure federated statistical analysis of individual data.

EU Research

Data harmonization is achieved using a systematic approach supported by web-based software. First, biobanks are recruited to participate in the HOP and are documented on the BioSHaRE website (www.bioshare.eu). Secondly, variables of interest are selected and defined by participating investigators. These ‘target’ variables describe the common format into which biobankspecific data will need to be transformed. Third, using participating biobanks’ questionnaires and data dictionaries, the potential for each biobank to generate target variables is evaluated. Fourth, processing algorithms transforming source data into the ‘target’ format are developed and implemented for each biobank whenever harmonization is deemed possible. Data harmonization and federated analysis of population-based studies: the BioSHaRE project (Dany Doiron, Vincent Ferretti, Paul Burton, Yannick Marcon, Amadou Gaye, Bruce H Wolffenbuttel, Markus Perola, Ronald P Stolk, Luisa Foco, Cosetta Minelli, Melanie Waldenberger, Rolf Holle, Kirsti Kvaløy, Hans L Hillege, Anne-Marie Tassé and Isabel Fortier) Emerging Themes in Epidemiology 2013, 10:12 doi:10.1186/1742-7622-10-12

While BioSHaRE is building on this earlier research, it is notably the first project to really use it in scientific projects. This combination of tool development and scientific research is proving very productive. “We are building on existing methods and infrastructure, particularly the P3G project in Québec, one of the first global expertise centers on biobank research, and for pooling data. Another important building block is BBMRI, the European infrastructure for biobanks,” says Professor Ronald Stolk, the project’s scientific coordinator.

Insights into harmonization The harmonization process itself is highly complex however, with researchers needing to take the many differences between individual biobanks and how they gathered their information into account. Not only will the data have been obtained in different time periods, with different ‘standards’, but they will also have been initiated with a myriad of different intentions. “Some will have been

www.euresearcher.com

providing a random sample of a certain population, others maybe aimed to screen participants for certain characteristics,” points out Ms Giepmans. It is therefore very important to not only provide information on what variables are available in individual biobanks, but also the context of the biobank and the ‘meta data’. “Take something as basic as blood pressure. Was it measured at rest, in the doctor’s office, or was it ambulatory? While some of these factors cannot be harmonized, they are important when interpreting the results. In BioSHaRE we obtain all this data on the participating biobanks and make it available on our website,” explains Ms Giepmans. Many biobanks collect data on alcohol consumption for example, but one may have just asked questions about overall consumption per week while the other distinguished between red and white wine, beer and liquor. Also, for physical or laboratory measures, the biobanks will have used different methods, adding a further layer of complexity.

Scientific Research There are five projects within the wider BioSHaRE.eu initiative, the most important currently being the Healthy Obese project, which is pooling data from multiple biobanks to assess several obesity-related questions. The first phase of this work involved harmonizing the baseline variables such as age, glucose levels and blood lipid profile, after which further variables will be considered. “When this first phase is complete more variables will be added, like genetic and life style risk factors,” says Ms Giepmans. It is extremely difficult however to harmonize complex variables like levels of physical activity, diet and quality of life, which are also relevant to obesity. “The first important step is defining to what level we can harmonize the data and how we should do that,” continues Ms Giepmans. “Along with the Healthy Obese project, we also have the Environmental Determinants of Health project, which specifically investigates air and noise pollution.”

At a glance Full Project Title Biobank Standardisation and Harmonisation for Research Excellence in the European Union. 2013 (BioSHaRE-EU) Project Objectives Develop harmonized measures and standardized computing infrastructures enabling the effective pooling of data from biobanks (cohort studies) to investigate common complex diseases. Contact Details Dr Lisette Giepmans BioSHaRE Project Manager Department of Epidemiology University Medical Center Groningen Hanzeplein 1 9713 GZ Groningen The Netherlands T: +31 - (0)50 - 361 0114 E: l.giepmans@umcg.nl W: www.bioshare.eu DataSHAPER: http://www.datashaper.org/ DataSHIELD: http://datashield.org Opal and Mica: http://www.obiba.org Open source software for biobanks

Professor Ronald Stolk Dr Lisette Giepmans

“That’s also interesting, because for that research we have geo-coded the addresses of all the participants. So we’ve coded where they live in relation to air pollution, noise and traffic models. We’re in the process of finding the harmonized level of noise and air exposure that each of the participants have been exposed to, and linking that to the incidence of disease, but there are important issues around privacy.”

Ethical, Legal and Social aspects of BioSHaRE These ethical and legal considerations are a priority for BioSHaRE. People may have given their consent for their data to be used domestically, but not necessarily internationally, an issue of which Professor Stolk is well aware. “There are restrictions about how you can use that data and whether you can combine it with data from other countries, then there are limitations with the legal aspects related to the data collection of each individual biobank. You have to negotiate these hurdles if you want to do pooled analysis,” he says. The project’s ethical team is guiding this process to ensure that such concerns are fully taken into account. “One of the solutions we have developed, which was started before BioSHaRE.eu but which we’ve pushed, is federated data analysis. This means that the data stays in the original location, and the researchers don’t have to physically get the data over from the individual biobank to their particular office to be able to analyse it,” continues Professor Stolk.

Dissemination and collaboration The project’s ultimate aim is to make its work available for the whole biobanking community. However, along with the technical complexity of harmonizing data, there are also other logistical hurdles to overcome. “We are talking with the National Institute of Health (NIH) in the US and the Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR) to see if we can use a number of the tools we are developing in a project in North America. We have also done some preliminary investigations to see if we can harmonise Chinese biobanks as well, and it seems quite feasible,” says Professor Stolk. Pooling this information increases heterogeneity and gives researchers access to a wider range of data, allowing them to analyse disease in greater depth. This further underlines the importance of data sharing. “These biobanks include data on everybody – so if you can pool it effectively you get a huge resource of information. The big advantage of population-based biobanks compared to any other form of research is that it’s real life data – you don’t have to interpret the research to make it applicable to the population,” stresses Professor Stolk. “You can of course do very detailed analysis of blood-pressure lowering mechanisms through studying laboratory animals for example. But if you do biobank studies you can look at the medication that people use for blood pressure, the results of that medication, and if they like it or not.”

Professor Ronald Stolk is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Groningen. He has worked extensively on life course epidemiology approaches of chronic diseases focusing on cohort studies, both in patients and in the general population. Dr Lisette Giepmans is project manager of BioSHaRE at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She has worked for commercial and academic organizations on clinical research, evidence-based medicine and policy making in health care.

EU Research

Neuronal disorders are marked by changes in blood values, which can be used to improve diagnosis. We spoke to Dr Eugenia Wang about her research into developing a blood test to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease, work which will also offer important insights into its progression and development

Advanced Genomic Technology for Alzheimer’s diagnosis

As the most common form of dementia in the world, Alzheimer’s disease is a major global health issue, and with the number of cases set to rise further as life expectancy increases, research into both treatment and diagnosis is an urgent priority. Currently the disease is diagnosed by either a neurological assessment such as the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE score) or an MRI scan, but now Dr Eugenia Wang is developing a test to diagnose Alzheimer’s by measuring levels of microRNAs in the blood. “microRNAs are tiny molecules that are carried in our bloodstream. Our body has what I would call our equilibrium status, but when something changes suddenly, then our body will reflect this change in the bloodstream,” she explains. Dr Wang says this change in the body’s physiology can be detected. “In the case of a disease situation you can see changes in the plasma of the blood, which are the footprint of the disease process,” she continues. Some individuals start to suffer from mild cognitive impairment (MCI) as they grow older, which is often marked by short-term memory loss. This of course is

www.euresearcher.com

a major concern to the individual affected, but by and large they are still able to live independently; by contrast, cases of Alzheimer’s disease have a far more significant impact. “Alzheimer’s disease cases are characterized by the person starting to lose the ability to perform daily activities, like how to eat and how to bathe,” says Dr Wang. It is thought that people who score less than 24 on the MMSE score are suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, which is then the basis for a more detailed diagnosis. “Then you sub-divide Alzheimer’s patients into three categories; mild is 21-24 on MMSE score, moderate is 10-20, and severe is between 4-9,” outlines Dr Wang. “Not everybody suffering from MCI will convert to bona fide Alzheimer’s disease, but some will. About 15 per cent, annually, convert from MCI to Alzheimer’s disease.”

Oxy-miRs The first objective in Dr Wang’s research was to identify blood differences between Alzheimer’s disease cases and normal controls. Dr Wang and her colleagues have found that this is mainly expressed

through Oxy-miRs, a particular species of microRNA whose functions are associated with oxidative defence. “So far we have identified six types of Oxy-miR (reference at the end of the article) that can differentiate between Alzheimer’s patients and normal elderly controls. We are doing in-depth, large population studies on three of them,” she outlines. Oxy-miRs are a subgroup of microRNAs which functionally suppress the expression of a lot of target molecules, acting almost as a dimmer switch which controls levels of gene expression. “We identified the OxymiR species, made a full gene sequence and put it in a vector, then we put it in a mouse. We’ve made a few transgenic mutant strains, and they now express these same microRNAs, but they overproduce them. So these mice are accelerated in their ageing effects, and are being tested now for the amyloid marker associated with Alzheimer’s. Early data shows us these mice have an accelerated senescent phenotype,” explains Dr Wang. These Oxy-miRs are not solely associated with ageing, however, but also play a key role in the body’s defence

against oxidative stress, which occurs when superoxides build up in response to stress, be it emotional, or any other type such as that caused by environmental pollutants. Dr Wang says the body has a mechanism to overcome this. “It has a lot of defence enzymes to get rid of the superoxides. The back-line defence of the body is very smart; it can say, ‘okay, this cell has really got too damaged, I want to get rid of it.’ So it institutes a cell death programme called apoptosis,” she explains. When we want to get rid of damaged cells we institute this mechanism by Oxy-miRs, but this same mechanism can cause problems in later life, a classic case of what scientists call antagonistic pleiotropism. “You gain something in early life at the expense of losing control of it in later life. So in our life we need Oxy-miRs, but an accumulation of them late in life can become too much for us to deal with. Then they may be inappropriately expressed in cells where you do not want them,” says Dr Wang. The human brain is very versatile and very plastic, so it can accommodate the loss of a certain number of synapses and cells, as typically occurs during the ageing process. However, beyond a certain threshold, losing synapses will begin to cause significant problems. “It’s about how much you can tolerate the loss. So normal elderly controls may lose only 40 per cent. With Alzheimer’s maybe you lose 60 per cent, and you’re into a disease situation. That is the molecular marker we’re looking for, the threshold changes

between Alzheimer’s disease and normal controls,” says Dr Wang. Researchers are looking at plasma, the cell-free component of blood, to monitor levels of microRNAs, including Oxy-miRs. “Every human being has a defined volume of blood - you can tolerate a certain amount of change either side. Our blood cells have a fixed lifespan, while our plasma is really a reflection of what we are; it’s

generated by discharges from cell-to-cell communication, or from the dead cells from all the tissues. Blood cells effectively bathe in plasma, which is where we can detect and monitor OxymiR levels,” explains Dr Wang.

Blood test This will provide clinicians with important insights into the progression and development of the disease, as well as enabling them to monitor the effectiveness of treatment. There is currently no cure for Alzheimer’s, but issues like stress levels and diet are known to be risk factors in the development of the disease, so a blood test could form the basis of more tailored interventions. “I think we should look to develop what I call a combinatory approach which combines stress reduction, mental and physical exercise and dietary changes. Improvements in diagnosis will allow clinicians to focus therapeutic intervention,” says Dr Wang. Eventually

EU Research

certification, with a community population. That is a step towards commercialisation, and marketing our tests,” says Dr Wang. The proof of principle is already established and patented; now Dr Wang aims to take her test to the market. Caring for Alzheimer’s patients currently costs the US more than $100 billion a year, but a blood test could help health authorities plan care more effectively, potentially bringing down costs. “We can look at a patient’s Oxy-miR levels and their MMSE score and see that’s defining them as moderate, meaning someone who probably can’t eat well and has to be reminded to fulfil some of their daily functions. We can then tailor healthcare delivery to their particular condition,” explains Dr Wang. This is very important for the care giver often a relative who already carries a

So far we have identified six types of Oxy-miR that can differentiate between Alzheimer’s patients and normal elderly controls. We are doing in-depth, large population studies on three of them Dr Wang would like to use this test as a general Alzheimer’s screening test for everybody aged 65 or over, a move towards a more personalised approach. “Then each person could say; ‘oh, my Oxy-miR is not at a good level – maybe I should modify my diet or take more exercise. That is what I would call a more broad-based approach,” she says. It would also be considerably less expensive than the current methods of diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease. MRI scans are prohibitively expensive for many people and not all hospitals have a neurological assessment facility, whereas the blood test Dr Wang is developing would be much less costly. “Our goal is for such a blood test to be used in a ‘point of care’ facility such as a doctor’s office or a clinic, where you can go to give a blood sample. They can send a plasma sample to our company, Advanced Genomic Technology, and we can evaluate the OxymiR status,” she says. This could be used as a first stage screening test, as blood samples are readily accessible, then a recommendation could be made on whether the next level of testing is required. “We’re ready to take the next step, called CLIA (Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment) laboratory

www.euresearcher.com

heavy burden - as they typically want to help them maintain a degree of independence. “For somebody with a mild case, with an MMSE score on the borderline, you may want to provide them with a meal that they could handle themselves, and they would have more independence,” says Dr Wang. This test could also be highly important in the earlier stages of the disease, leading to earlier diagnosis and allowing people to take preventative action, such as modifying their diet or taking more exercise. The first population studies, based upon which the test has been patented, were done on a clinical population in Montreal by two neurologists with whom Dr Wang collaborates; now she plans to work with people who have been identified as being at risk of developing Alzheimer’s, to gain further insights into the early stages of the disease. “We have deliberately selected people who are in their ‘50s - we are working with five groups of people in their ‘50s, and have started to collect blood samples. These include people with a family history of Alzheimer’s disease in first degree relatives, and other people who are lacking such a family history as the control,” she outlines.

At a glance Full Project Title GENERATING BLOOD-BASED DIAGNOSIS FOR ALZHEIMER DISEASE Project Objectives AGT’s mission is to develop and market a non-invasive, blood-based test for diagnosis and prognosis of: (1.) Alzheimer’s disease (AD) victims and at-risk groups, including individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and elderly > 65 years of age; and (2.) metastatic ovarian cancer (ova-ca), providing RNA-based early detection for restricted metastatic carcinoma. Project Funding National Institute on Aging of the National Institutes of Health, USA; Kentucky Science Technology Corporation Contact Details Project Coordinator, Dr Eugenia Wang 5100 US Highway 42 Suite 433 Louisville, KY 40241 USA T: +1 502 228 5438 E: ewangagt@gmail.com W: www.advancedgenomictechnology.com Schipper, H. M., Maes, O. C., Chertkow, H. M., and Wang, E. MicroRNA expression in Alzheimer blood mononuclear cells. Gene Regulation and Systems Biology 1: 263 - 274 (2007). PMID: 19936094.

Dr Eugenia Wang

Project Coordinator

Dr Eugenia Wang is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the School of Medicine, University of Louisville (UofL), Louisville, Kentucky. She also holds the Gheens Endowed Chair in Aging and is the Director of the Gheens Center on Aging at UofL. Dr. Wang investigates the molecular mechanisms controlling the process of aging, at both cellular and organismic levels.

Molecular networks are subject to many interactions between components, while the components themselves can exist in multiple states. Researchers need sophisticated mathematical methods to understand how such complex networks process information, as Dr Jeremy Gunawardena, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School explains

Making sense of molecular networks The complexity of molecular networks is a challenge for biology researchers, who need sophisticated new mathematical methods to track how these networks process information and make decisions. This is an area of long-standing interest to Dr Jeremy Gunawardena, coordinator of the Algebraic Geometric Approaches to Biological Complexity project. “This project is trying to exploit some methods from pure mathematics which have not been used in biology at the molecular level before. We think these methods have some very powerful features that allow us to rise above molecular complexity,” he says. Based at Harvard Medical School in the US, Dr Gunawardena and his colleagues are now using these ideas, which have their roots in a discipline called algebraic geometry, to get a sense of the capabilities of very complicated networks. “We’re really trying to get a functional understanding of the network of molecular interactions. The underlying complexity has two forms,” he outlines. “One is that there are a lot of interactions between the components. The other issue is that the components themselves can exist in multiple states. So you have the complexity of the components themselves, as well as the complexity of the interactions through which the components talk to each other.” Chemical signals

The molecular networks within cells can be stimulated by external chemical signals, such as growth factors or hormones that are typically conveyed around the body in blood or within tissues. These signals impinge on molecules in the membrane of the cell, the receptor molecules. “These receptor molecules

become activated, and they instigate a process of signal transduction inside the cell. They recruit various molecular components, and they undertake various forms of processing on that signal until the cell decides what to do as a result of seeing that signal. Signal transduction networks are typical of the systems we look at,” explains Dr Gunawardena. The signal might be a cue for the cell to begin to divide and proliferate, or to go down a differentiation pathway and become a particular type of cell. “These signal transduction networks could participate in decision-making in early development,” continues Dr Gunawardena. “Once the organism has actually been constructed and reached adulthood then evolution is very good at re-using these mechanims, so that the same signal transduction networks can implement the organism’s normal physiological responses. They can also become deranged when the organism falls ill, which is why understanding their functionality can help us develop more effective therapies.” There are multiple layers of complexity within these networks, with various signals, mechanisms and events affecting the way they are structured. The project is mainly focusing on the protein level, at which there is a particularly high level of complexity. “Once a gene has been turned on, once a protein has been expressed and is present in the cell, evolution has found ways to actually modify the structure of the protein,” explains Dr Gunawardena. These modifications can occur with different chemical groups. “Pretty much any protein in any cell in your body is continuously being subjected to this post-

EU Research

Everyone who tries to study biology these days comes up against the problem of molecular complexity. We believe that algebraic geometry offers us a mathematical language which can help us rise above that complexity and thereby complement the insights

which come from experimental studies

translational modification, as it’s called. So, even though that protein came from a single gene, and one might think; ‘ok we’ve got a single gene, we’ve got a single protein’ – in practice that protein could be in millions of modification states,” points out Dr Gunawardena. “We’re talking about just one protein here, and we have this huge network of proteins, all of which are interacting and different modification states of one protein may behave differently to other modification states of the protein. We’re particularly interested in these kinds of protein-level complexities that come from post-translational modification.”

Mathematical methods Researchers are using mathematical methods to distil some of the underlying principles behind this complexity. These methods are potentially very powerful, because of the way in which chemistry works. “Once you describe biochemistry in mathematical terms and try to explain how biochemical reactions work, they give rise to polynomial equations. These equations are sums of many terms, each of which looks like a product of the key variables,” explains Dr Gunawardena. From a mathematical point of view algebraic geometry can be thought of as the mathematical study of polynomial systems; Dr Gunawardena believes that combining these methods with biochemical understanding could yield important results. “There’s often a lot of accumulated knowledge about some aspects of the complexity that we see, and a lot of experimental evidence for instance about the number of modification states that a particular protein would have, as well as knowledge about the reactions through which other proteins control and regulate those modifications,” he says. “We often start from knowledge of the network of reactions that is outlined in the literature, that’s typically our starting point. We try to use mathematics to distil predictions from that, which we can then test experimentally.” The systems inside cells tend to have a lot of moving parts but only certain things can be measured experimentally. Researchers have discovered that it is possible to focus on a small number of components, and by doing so gain wider insights. “We could say; ‘we’re particularly interested in these components, because we think these are the key regulators,’”

www.euresearcher.com

At a glance Full Project Title Algebraic Geometric Approaches to Biological Complexity Project Objectives My research group studies information processing in mammalian cells using a combination of experimental, mathematical and computational approaches. We are particularly interested in exploiting new methods from pure mathematics to distill biological principles from the new molecular understanding that has emerged from the Human Genome and other genome projects. Contact Details Project Coordinator, Jeremy Gunawardena Associate Professor, Virtual Cell Program Department of Systems Biology Harvard Medical School 200 Longwood Avenue Boston, MA 02115, USA T: +1 617 432 4839 E: jeremy@hms.harvard.edu W: http://sysbio.med.harvard.edu/ faculty/gunawardena/

explains Dr Gunawardena. The question here is whether it’s possible to eliminate all the background complexity, and just focus on the key components of interest; Dr Gunawardena says algebraic geometry provides methods for doing this in a systematic way. “It may be that there isn’t an equation between the components that we’ve selected, because there’s more complexity that we didn’t appreciate,” he

relatively small systems because the current algorithms are slow and computationally expensive. However, Dr Gunawardena says it’s often the case that researchers can still get by with restricting attention to a simpler class of equations. “We’re interested in developing more powerful computational tools, computational algorithms which are much faster, but which only tell us about certain

The components themselves can exist in multiple states. So you have the complexity of the components, as well as the complexity of the interactions through

which they talk to each other

says. “But what we can do is try to work out the equations, and if we fail then that gives us a hint as to what other things we might want to include, until finally we’ve got a small set of things that include the components we’re interested in, as well as those we possibly hadn’t appreciated previously. We’ve got an equation on just those things, and now we can go and test that. We don’t have to measure everything in the network, we just have to look at those particular components.” These methods could in principle be applied to virtually any system, but in practice they only work efficiently for

kinds of equations, which are good enough for the problem at hand” he outlines. “Everyone who tries to study biology these days comes up against the problem of molecular complexity. We believe that algebraic geometry offers us a mathematical language which can help us rise above that complexity and thereby complement the insights which come from experimental studies. It can help us to look at very complicated molecular and cellular machines and identify the principles on which they work.”

Jeremy Gunawardena

Project Coordinator

Jeremy Gunawardena is a pure mathematician by training. He held academic appointments at the University of Chicago and Trinity College, Cambridge before joining Hewlett-Packard (HP) Research. He became HP’s Director of Basic Research in Europe before returning to academic life as Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology.

EU Research

Nanoelectroablation: A Revolutionary Cancer Therapy Nanoelectroablation is a completely new approach to treating tumors that triggers apoptosis, the tumor cell’s own programmed cell death pathway. Once triggered, the tumor slowly shrinks and is scavenged by the immune system, initiating an innate immune response that attacks other tumors in mice, writes Dr Richard Nuccitelli of BioElectroMed Corp Electrical pulse technology has been applied to living cells since the 1970’s and was first used to generate transient increases in the permeability of a cell’s plasma membrane, a technique called electroporation. Researchers continue to investigate the capacity of electric fields to modify cells, with a particular focus at BioElectroMed on how the electrical properties of tissues can be utilized to detect and treat disease.

These nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEFs) have profound effects on treated cells, with their most important characteristic being their ability to penetrate into the cell cytoplasm to

Unique Mechanism

Electric fields When electric fields on the order of 1 volt are applied across a biological membrane they cause a breakdown in the lipid bilayer of the cell’s plasma membrane. This results in a water-filled pathway across the lipid membrane that allows ions and other small molecules to cross the normally impermeable lipid bilayer. Early studies in this area used pulsed electric fields in the microsecond and millisecond time domains, with field strengths on the order of 1 kV/cm. It was found that the pores that formed in cell membranes were transient and reversible unless the field strength was increased to 2-3 kV/cm, in which case irreversible pores were formed that killed cells by necrosis, where cell death is caused by the influx of external factors such as calcium ions. It is now possible to apply much shorter electrical pulses than those used in electroporation, which opens up new possibilities in treatment. These shorter pulses, in the nanosecond time domain with electric field strengths of between 10-100 kV/cm, also introduce transient, water-filled defects across the plasma membrane. However, only molecules with a diameter less than 1 nanometre (nm) can cross the membrane through these transient nanopore pathways.

www.euresearcher.com

permeabilize organelle membranes as well as the plasma membrane [1]. BioElectroMed is developing novel bioelectric approaches based on low energy, non-thermal, nsPEFs which penetrate into every cell and trigger apoptosis, the cell’s own programmed cell death pathway.

Figure 1. Melanoma treated on day 0 with 2000 pulses 30 kV/cm, 100 ns long. Left column shows transillumination image of tumor beneath nude mouse skin taken on the day after nsPEF treatment indicated in upper left of photo. Right column shows the reflected light image of the skin above the melanoma taken on the same day. The scale bar on the upper left applies to all images.

All cells are bound by an outer plasma membrane, normally composed of a lipid bilayer with associated glycoproteins, which exhibits very low conductivity in comparison to the cytoplasm and extracellular fluid. This means the cell can be modelled as a conductor surrounded by an insulating layer, as is also generally true for organelles within the cytoplasm of cells. When an electric field is imposed across a cell, ions in the cytoplasm respond by rapidly moving in the field direction to charge the capacitance of the membrane until they experience no further force. By definition, this will only occur when their redistribution establishes an equal and opposite field so that the net field in the cell interior is zero. The duration of this redistribution is characterized by the charging time constant of the membrane, which is typically in the 0.1-1 microsecond (µs) range. Nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEFs) are much faster than that so they penetrate into the cell before the charged molecules can redistribute to counteract the field. Once inside the cell, this field can generate nanopores in all organelle membranes if the field is large enough. This ability to penetrate into the cytoplasm allows nsPEFs to permeabilize the organelle membranes as well as the plasma membrane, which is one of the

major differences between nsPEFs and earlier protocols (Fig. 2). However, the varying sizes of the organelles also need to be taken into account in this work. Organelle sizes range from the large nucleus, between 2 and 6 micrometers (µm), to the much smaller endoplasmic reticulum tubular network and mitochondria in the 0.3-1 µm range. Once the field has penetrated the cytoplasm, fields of 1 volt over 0.3-1 µm (10-33 kV/cm) are required to achieve the permeabilizing field of 1 volt across these smaller organelles. These strengths are an order of magnitude higher than those used for the original electroporation work using microsecond and millisecond pulse lengths.

found that a single treatment of 2000 pulses, each 100 ns in duration and 30 kV/ cm in amplitude, was sufficient to ablate these tumors [2]. (Fig. 1).

The goal in this work was to study the effectiveness of nsPEFs in treating more naturally occurring melanomas, which led to a collaboration with Ed DeFabo of

Small amount of energy delivered The energy delivered to the cell is an important consideration when applying such large electric fields. As these nanosecond pulses are 1,000 times shorter than the classical electroporation pulses, the duration of energy delivery is also lower by a factor of 1,000. So even when a 10-fold higher amplitude is applied, the energy delivered is only 2.17 Joules, which will increase tissue temperature by only 0.5º C. Therefore the nsPEF is able to both penetrate into the cytoplasm and also apply a field strength large enough to influence organelle permeability, two critical features which make it a very powerful tool. The focus now is on using these features to improve treatment; BioElectroMed has been developing a non-thermal therapy to ablate tumors implanted in mice with a single treatment, and the results to date are impressive.

Figure 2. Electric field distribution in and around a cell during a 100 µs pulse (left) and a 100 ns pulse (right). For a 100 ns pulse the field penetrates into the cell and every organelle to generate small water-filled pores in the organelle membranes.

Nanoelectroablation Evidence Work started with the B16 murine melanoma allograft model system, in which murine melanoma cells injected beneath the skin grow into a melanoma that can be treated with nsPEF. It was

Figure 3. Survival curve for nude mice with a single human pancreatic carcinoma xenograft tumor. Tumors in 19 mice were treated with 2000 pulses, 30 kV/cm, 100 ns long. Tumors in 17 mice served as untreated controls. All of the nanoelectroablated tumors disappeared without recurrence for the 300 days tested. All of the control tumors grew so large that the mice had to be sacrificed.

EU Research

At a glance

George Washington University, who had developed a UV-induced melanoma model using C57/BL6 HGF/SF mice. All 27 melanomas treated in 14 of these mice were successfully ablated using 2000 pulses, each of which were 100 ns long and 30 kV/cm in amplitude[3]. This treatment was called ‘non-thermal nanoelectroablation’ and it was found to have significant effects on melanomas. All nanoelectroablated melanomas gradually disappeared over a period of 1229 days. Pyknosis of the nuclei was evident within an hour and DNA fragmentation as detected by TUNEL staining was evident within six hours of nsPEF treatment, while other effects were also observed.

day of treatment. After four weeks they were 99.8% ablated if the tumor was located within the ablation zone. Pyknosis was evident within two days of nsPEF treatment and DNA fragmentation as detected by TUNEL staining was also found. The biologists at BioElectroMed have been ablating xenograft tumors created by injecting human pancreatic carcinoma cells beneath the skin of immunosupressed mice. After treating dozens of human pancreatic tumor cells with a range of pulse numbers, they determined that 500 pulses of 100 ns duration and 30 kV/cm amplitude were sufficient to ablate these tumors completely with a single treatment.

It is this ability to penetrate into the cytoplasm and to permeabilize the organelle membranes as well as the plasma membrane which provides one of the

major distinctions between nsPEFs and other electroporation treatments. BioElectroMed also demonstrated that nanoelectroablation stimulated an immune response that actually inhibited secondary tumor formation in an allograft model. Other groups have also reported that apoptotic cells can trigger an immune response. BioElectroMed is continuing research in this area and has found that secondary tumors injected into mice whose original tumors had been nanoelectroablated are invaded by natural killer T cells. Another more naturally occurring skin cancer model is the basal cell carcinoma (BCC) Ptch1+/-K14-Cre-ER p53 fl/fl mouse model, which was developed by Dr Ervin Epstein of the Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute. These BCCs developed naturally on the skin of mice that were treated as pups with ionizing radiation. Twenty-seven of these BCCs were treated and all began to shrink within a

www.euresearcher.com

They also conducted a long-term study of 19 mice in which a single tumor was nanoelectroablated and observed over a period of at least 300 days (Fig. 3). No tumor recurrence was detected over this period, whereas untreated control tumors continued to grow and we were forced to sacrifice all control mice within 110 days.

Human carcinomas The ultimate goal of this research is to use nanoelectroablation to treat human carcinomas, and indeed an initial clinical trial has already been held treating three patients with multiple BCCs. Seventy percent of the BCCs were eliminated with a single treatment and no scarring occurred. These very interesting data confirm that nanoelectroablation is also an effective therapy for treating human tumors.

Full Project Title Nanosecond pulsed electric fields trigger apoptosis in treated tumors (Nanoelectroablation) Project Objectives BioElectroMed is a biotech company developing medical devices for the detection and treatment of cancer. The company is developing low energy, non-thermal, nanosecond pulsed electric fields, which penetrate into every cell and organelle located between the delivery electrodes and trigger apoptosis, the tumour cell’s own programmed cell death pathway. Contact Details Project Coordinator, Richard Nuccitelli, Ph.D. Vice President BioElectroMed Corp. 849 Mitten Rd., Suite 104 Burlingame, CA 94010 E: rich@bioelectromed.com W: www.bioelectromed.com [1] Schoenbach KH, Beebe SJ, Buescher ES. Bioelectromagnetics 2001; 22(6):440-448. [2] Nuccitelli R, Tran K, Sheikh S, Athos B, Kreis M, Nuccitelli P. Int J Cancer 2010; 127(7):1727-1736. [3] Nuccitelli R, Tran K, Lui K, Huynh J, Athos B, Kreis M et al. Pigment Cell Melanoma Res 2012; 25:618-629.

Dr Richard Nuccitelli

Project Coordinator

Richard Nuccitelli is a biophysicist who received his M.S. degree in Physics and his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Purdue University. He has been a professor at both the University of California at Davis and at the Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics at Old Dominion University. He cofounded BioElectroMed with Pamela Nuccitelli in 2001.

A gene-activated platform for tissue repair Growth factors play a central role in the mechanisms behind bone and cartilage regeneration, mechanisms which are disrupted in people suffering from arthritis. We spoke to Professor Christian Plank of the GAMBA project about their work in developing a geneactivated matrix platform for tissue repair and how it could improve treatment of the condition It is known that growth factors play a central role in many important mechanisms within the body, including bone and cartilage regeneration. This area forms the main research focus of the GAMBA project, which is aiming to develop a gene-activated matrix platform for tissue repair, taking into account the underlying nature of the repair process. “Usually it’s not one growth factor alone that induces tissue repair, but rather several growth factors in concerted action,” says Professor Dr Christian Plank, one of the project’s scientific initiators. The scientific question for the project, the nanotechnology part of their research, was whether a nano/ biotechnology approach could be used to get three growth factors into concerted action. “Is it possible to address the appearance and disappearance of growth factors; can we turn them on and off? And can we do this in different compartments?” continues Professor Plank. “One technical and therapeutic tool to do this is gene therapy – gene vectors. You can construct systems using gene vectors where you can switch gene expression on and off.”

Arthritis This research could have important implications for the treatment of arthritis.

The body maintains a delicate balance between degrading and regenerating processes in our bones, tissue and cartilage, which is disrupted in people suffering from the condition. “In arthritis the natural healthy balance is out of regulation. For example, in bone you have osteoblasts – the bone cells which are important for the formation of bone – and osteoclasts, which eat bone, they degrade it. These two cell types are in balance in healthy bone. In arthritis the

Professor Plank. “It is known that inflammatory reactions are important causes for overwhelming degradation.” This type of research is an important element of the GAMBA project, yet the focus for Professor Plank and his colleagues is on basic research and developing a gene-activated matrix. The matrix is designed to carry gene vectors to damaged tissue and stimulate the regeneration process. “The other important role of the matrix is that it’s a

Is it possible to address the appearance and disappearance of growth factors; can we turn them on and off? And can we do this in different compartments? One technical and therapeutic tool to do this is gene therapy natural healthy balance is out of regulation and the degradation processes overwhelm the regenerative processes” explains Professor Plank. Research groups in GAMBA are working to identify the growth factors involved in arthritis, and to investigate the underlying causes of the condition. “There is still a lot to find out about the molecular causes of arthritis. One of the major questions is whether impaired regenerative potential is the cause of the disease, or whether other factors are also involved,” says

substrate for cells to grow in the matrix, while it’s also biodegradeable,” outlines Professor Plank. The matrix introduces one gene vector to regenerate bone, one to regenerate cartilage, and one to fight inflammation. “They are the three different targets that we have. They act in three different compartments within the joint,” says Professor Plank. “If you consider the knee joint, the lowest compartment would be the bone, which naturally is covered by cartilage. The cartilage faces the synovium, which is

EU Research

The GAMBA team

the fluid in the knee joint, where you have these inflammatory factors in the diseased joint. The situation in the diseased joint can be modelled with so-called osteochondral defect models, so defects where cartilage is missing, and also bone is degenerating. Such models can be established with pieces of bone from the slaughterhouse or in animal experiments.” These defects will be filled with a matrix platform carrying three gene vectors. First there will be a vector to induce bone regeneration, followed by a compartment with a vector to support cartilage regeneration, and an upper compartment facing the joint fluid. “This upper compartment will have a vector which will produce an anti-inflammatory effect in response to inflammation in the joint,”

www.euresearcher.com

explains Profesor Plank. The project’s Dutch partners have been working with bone from cows to look at the effects of these different growth factors. “They drill a 1cm diameter hole into the surface of the tibia - they drill through the cartilage, into the bone, and eventually into the bone marrow space. And then they keep this piece of bone in culture, and we examine what happens in the drill hole when you add different growth factors,” continues Professor Plank. “Our idea was to use exactly such a model to reproduce these three compartments that I’ve talked about. This work is still ongoing – the idea was to look at these idealised, standardised defects for research purposes.” The project’s French partners have produced a bone replacement material,

which has been approved for clinical use, while researchers are also working on methods to promote cartilage regeneration. The gene vector promoting cartilage regeneration has been embedded in a hydrogel. “The hydrogel would also support cell growth, but it would be a gel as opposed to a bone replacement material, which is a solid body. The third thing would be mesenchymal stem cells, which have the potential to differentiate into not only bone cells, but also into cartilage cells,” outlines Professor Plank. This would stimulate cells to form the desired tissue and generate bone morphogenetic protein, which would induce bone regeneration; however, Professor Plank says it is difficult to control the level of bone formation. “We have found, along

At a glance Full Project Title Gene activated matrices for bone and cartilage regeneration in arthritis (GAMBA) Project Objectives The GAMBA Consortium is developing a novel gene-activated matrix platform for bone and cartilage repair with a focus on osteoarthritis-related tissue damage. The scientiﬁ c and technological objectives of this project are complemented with an innovative program of public outreach, actively linking patients and society to the evolvement of this project. Project Funding Total budget €3,526,178, total requested EU contribution €2,644,630. Contact Details Project Coordinator, Dr Martina Anton Institute of Experimental Oncology and Therapy Research The ISAR TUM hospital Ismaninger Str. 22 81675 München Germany T: +49 89 4140 4453 E: m.anton@lrz.tum.de W: http://www.gamba-project.eu/ Plank et al.: Gene activated matrices for bone and cartilage regeneration in arthritis. Eur. J. Nanomed. 2012;4(1):17–32 © 2012 by Walter de Gruyter • Berlin • Boston. DOI 10.1515/ejnm-2012-0001

Professor Christian Plank

Group Leader

Christian Plank is a professor at the Institute of Experimental Oncology and Therapy Research of the Technische Universität München. In 2003 he cofounded OZ Biosciences, a company that develops and markets reagents and technologies for the delivery of active substances to living cells. In 2009 he cofounded ethris GmbH, a company which develops novel nucleic acid therapeutics.

with many others, that using the bone morphogenetic protein encoding vector alone leads to the healing of bone defects that otherwise would not heal, because the defect is too large. However, we don’t yet have a tool to control the level of bone formation,” he explains. This is a challenge that the GAMBA project is working to address. The main focus is on switching genes on and off, to control for example the production of the growth factor that promotes bone generation, while researchers are also looking at the anti-inflammatory response. “The idea for the antiinflammatory response was to have a

any more. This is a really interesting scientific and basic research challenge,” he outlines.

Basic research Resolving these questions around oscillator systems could have great implications for the treatment of arthritis. While GAMBA is focused on basic nanotechnology research, the project has also run outreach panels to understand how arthritis affects people individually. “We had two types of panels – patient panels and citizen panels. This was one of the highlights of the whole project, and was well appreciated by scientists, patients

The project’s French partners have produced a bone replacement material, which has been approved for clinical use, while researchers are also working on methods to promote cartilage regeneration feedback loop. So in the upper layer facing the synovium you would have a gene vector whose therapeutic gene is turned on in response to inflammatory signals from the synovium. Then the cells facing the synovium would start to produce an anti-inflammatory protein, which would turn off the inflammation in the synovium. It would be like an oscillator,” says Professor Plank. Many research questions remain before this type of system can be produced, but Professor Plank believes they can and will be solved. “The goal is to have this type of oscillator system in the joint. These systems will respond to a biological signal, and they will be turned off as soon as the biological signal isn’t present

and citizens,” says Professor Plank. The panels gave scientists important insights into how arthritis affects people, and the matrix platform could in future be the basis for more personalised treatment, taking into account the specific nature of each individual case. “You can modify the dosing of the vector to suit the needs of the patient. One patient may have a tissue defect for example, and you could give a higher dose of the anti-inflammatory vector, whereas a different patient would get more of the bone-generating vector,” continues Professor Plank. “This would be the kind of fine-tuning that could be done. The matrix is flexible enough to really adapt it to the patient’s particular situation.”

Dr Martina Anton and Professor Christian Plank

EU Research

SFI builds Ireland’s research base Scientific research is not only central to economic development; it can also have an impact beyond commerce. We met Professor Mark Ferguson, Director General of Science Foundation Ireland and Chief Scientific Adviser to the Government of Ireland, at his Dublin office to discuss the SFI’s investment strategy and the wider importance of scientific research

he roots of commercial development can be found in research, with scientists developing the new ideas and knowledge that could drive future growth. Scientific researchers hold vast expertise and technical knowledge, which the commercial sector is keen to tap into as they work to develop new products and services. The value of research is not measured purely in terms of the products it leads to though, and of course the results are by their very nature unforeseeable. While governments and funding agencies want to fund research that will have an impact, scientists still want the freedom to investigate fundamental questions. As David Mitchell once memorably put it; ‘if all academic endeavour had been vetted in advance for practicality we wouldn’t have the aeroplane or the iPhone, just a better mammoth trap’. A mammoth trap may have been useful at one point, but fundamental research is behind much of the material prosperity we enjoy today. As the Director General of Science Foundation Ireland (SFI), Professor Mark Ferguson has long experience in both academia and commerce, which he’s now using to help build Ireland’s research infrastructure. We met Professor Ferguson at his Dublin office to discuss the SFIs investment strategy, and how scientific research supports economic growth.

Scientific research EU Researcher: What types of research does SFI fund? Professor Mark Ferguson: SFI is the major Government funding agency for science in Ireland, our budget is about €150 million per annum. We fund predominantly in three sectors; life sciences - otherwise known as biotechnology - ICT and energy. Those are the three main areas that we fund. EUR: How did you identify those three areas? Are they areas where research can have the greatest commercial impact? MF: When SFI was established around 2000 it was with a view to supporting areas of science that would be of maximum economic and societal benefit to Ireland, and those three areas were identified. We’re interested in funding excellent research with potential impact, and linking it up with companies. There are a very large number of pharmaceutical companies in Ireland. Nearly all of them are in manufacturing, either biologics or small molecules. We have a research centre called the Solid State Pharmaceutical

You always have to explain the relevance of science, which is many-fold. It’s about producing trained people, linkages with companies, attracting them to Ireland and keeping them here, general educational awareness, it’s all those things 26

EU Research

Centre (SSPC) which relates to that part of the industry. It’s really about questions in chemistry like how you crystallise molecules, how you can get continuous flow synthesis, how you can formulate different ingredients. It’s about research into the manufacturing of either biological materials or small molecules. That’s very important for the industry in Ireland. Equally we have academic groups that are doing basic discovery about disease mechanisms and so on that could be of relevance to the research and development element of pharmaceutical companies. We are strongly encouraging those groups to win some of the outsourced projects that are coming from the pharmaceutical industry now, as it’s outsourcing more and more of its R & D. EUR: Is this part of efforts to encourage closer links between academia and the commercial sector?

MF: We are keen to build good associations with industry, and we’re taking a multi-faceted approach to that. Part of it is about joint research funding. So we announced recently that seven research centres would be established in Ireland, with funding of about €200 million from SFI and €100 million from industry, with about 150 industry partners involved. These seven centres relate to particular areas of excellence – Pharmaceutical Manufacture, Marine Energy, Materials Science and Nanotechnology, Photonics, Big Data Analytics, Pharmabiotics, Perinatal Health. Another level of industry engagement is licensing, where people maybe have a patented technology and they license it to a company. Another level of industry engagement is spin-off companies. There are spin-off companies in Ireland in the pharmaceutical, the ICT sector and the energy sectors. So it’s a question as to whether the technology is best exploited by an exchange, by a license, or by a spin-off company. All of those we encourage.

EUR: The Fraunhofer research institute recently announced that they will establish a branch in the UK. Is that something you would like to see in Ireland?

MF: We’re always open to partnerships. There are very few independent research institutes in Ireland. Currently the vast majority of research goes through the university sector. I believe strongly in partnerships where people essentially share risk and reward, so if we were contemplating any kind of institute it would be in a partnership mode.

Research funding EUR: How do you award funding and research grants? What are the key criteria? MF: We award all our research grants through a competitive process. People write a grant application and it goes out for international peer review, both for scientific excellence and for potential impact. We define impact broadly as the employability of the researchers and whether the research is likely to lead to something that could be commercially useful. Clearly you cannot precisely predict the results of research, but you can know something about the area and the international competition. We use only international reviewers which avoids

www.euresearcher.com

any bias issues in a small country and keeps the standards high. It’s very, very competitive, and funding success rates are of the order of about 15 per cent. That’s pretty much what they should be. Interestingly, in many countries they’ve dropped below that, in fact the US is much lower.

EUR: How does the Government react to those kinds of figures? MF: The Irish Government have kept faith with science, despite the economic crisis. There have been quite serious cuts in public services, but science has been spared the worst. Of course we’ve had some cuts, but not nearly like the order of cuts elsewhere. That’s because the Government is convinced that funding science is important for economic prosperity, for high-value jobs, and for attracting and retaining industry. You always have to explain the relevance of science, which is many-fold. It’s about producing trained people, linkages with companies, attracting them to Ireland and keeping them here, general educational awareness, it’s all those things. It’s a little less direct than the more immediate things of attracting a company who will employ a certain number of people. But it is an important part of the economic eco-system, and so far the Government have been receptive to that message.

EUR: What is the role of public funding bodies in general then? Is it to fund exploratory research that maybe is struggling to attract private investment? MF: My view is that public funding is not a substitute for private funding. Therefore all public funders should be prepared to take bigger risks than the private sector. Our remit is to fund cuttingedge stuff, potentially high-risk research, because if we don’t who else is? It’s also our remit to partner with various companies, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the research is either shortterm or very applied or in some way second rate. A really good sweet spot for us is where a leading company knows that it needs to be associated with a particular cutting edge area of research that is quite high risk and that may or may not work. That company cannot justify spending 100 per cent of its shareholders money on that research, but it could justify spending a certain proportion, and we can make up the remainder. That’s a really interesting sweet-spot for academic-industrial collaboration, because it’s absolutely where the academics want to be, at the cutting edge.

Agenda 2020 EUR: What are the main goals set out in Agenda 2020? MF: Agenda 2020 is our new strategy which we published in November 2012. One of the first things I did when I got the job here was to put together a new strategy for SFI, and that evolved through discussions with the board then widespread consultation with the academic and industrial community, as well as with politicians and the general public. Agenda 2020 has four basic aims. The first is that SFI will be the best science funding agency in the world at creating impact from excellent science. We’re not a big science funding agency – we only spend €150 million a year – but we can get the biggest bang for our buck. There are many metrics that you can use to measure performance, such as academic metrics like citation indices. Ireland is currently rated number 20 for citations in all areas of science which is pretty good – we’re ranked number one in genomics, two in probiotics, and eight in materials sciences. The science journal Nature do a global publishing index, and they talk about the countries that publish the most scientific papers that are likely to have an impact. They highlight five countries to watch, and Ireland is one of them. Ireland has a population of only 4.5 million people and SFI has a limited budget, so we cannot do all areas of science well. Our research prioritisation strategy identifies approximately 14 areas – they’re quite broadly defined – where we will focus our investment. It doesn’t mean we won’t fund anything elsewhere, but the scale of the investment will be much lower. So those are some of the academic metrics.

EUR: What about the economic metrics? MF: So, on the flipside of that, you can look at metrics which are more related to the wider economy. So for example, two-thirds of all the jobs that were created last year by our sister agency the IDA (Industrial Development Agency) in attracting multinational companies to Ireland had a prior linkage with an SFIfunded research group. When a company is deciding where to locate they look at lots of factors. They look at what language people speak, what is their attitude to the European Union, what’s the tax rate, what’s the availability of land? But they also look at whether there are trained people, can we have a good research interaction and so on. So we’re part of that eco-system, and we do have significant industrial participation in some of our programmes.

So it’s about having, good academic metrics and also good wider societal metrics. That’s the first part of agenda 2020 – excellence with impact. The second part is partnership. We’re a small country and we want to build partnerships – for example we’ve established a partnership with the Wellcome trust to fund biomedical research in Ireland under their schemes on a 50-50 basis. The third part is outreach which is about educating the public, so that they are comfortable both as users and producers of science. Then the last is to be a very efficient public service organisation. So we’re staffed in a lean and mean way, with very efficient turnaround and processing.

EUR: Is Agenda 2020 quite a big shift away from SFIs earlier strategy? MF: I would say it’s an evolution. My predecessors did a spectacularly good job in taking science in Ireland from a very low base to a very credible base. That was about building capacity within the system. Now we’re about strategic alignment. Having built some capacity, we now want to make sure that we can align that capacity, and maximise and supplement it where appropriate. There are some differences though, the first is the thematic funding. So previously all funding was open call – people just put in their proposals and they were assessed. We still have open calls, but we also focus on themes which allow us to develop certain areas of scientific research. The second difference is a focus on impact, as people have to justify the spend out of the public purse. Then the third difference is bigger scale investments, like these research centres. You can only do that when you’ve got a critical mass, and we didn’t have that twelve years ago. EUR: How important is it to attract students into science? Are science graduates seen as being very employable?

MF:

We’re interested in having a highly skilled, flexible workforce. If you’ve got general ICT skills, have some scientific training and can speak a foreign language then you can be fairly flexible about your employment. The world is changing and I don’t think there are any more jobs for life – people will change what they do at various times, and equipping them to handle that is very important. There are very good, high-end jobs across the science sector in Ireland, but people often don’t realise that a qualification in science can equip you to do a lot of things. You can work for a

We announced recently that seven research centres would be established in Ireland, with funding of about €200 million from SFI and €100 million from industry, with about 150 industry partners involved. These seven centres relate to particular areas of excellence 28

EU Research

pharmaceutical company, an ICT company, a medical device company, while betting companies are big employers of computing and maths graduates.

EUR: Are you prioritising certain areas of science? MF: The Government set up a research prioritisation group, with representatives from academia and industry, as well as policymakers, to identify areas in which Ireland should focus its science investment. They’re typically areas where we have already some strength in the country and where we could capture benefit to the country economically. About 14 priority areas were distilled out of that. So the research funds for really large centres, or very significant projects, will be focused on those 14 areas or other emerging areas of economic importance. That doesn’t mean that we won’t do any other things, it’ll just be through a different kind of funding, such as enabling people to collaborate for example.

EUR: That could be through European research programmes? MF: Yes, so it’s about leverage, and that’s a very important principle for SFI. We spend Irish taxpayers money, and we want to encourage the scientific community to leverage that money to go and win in other programmes, whether they be European programmes or collaborative programmes with industry or charity. Last year we spent €150 million, and the research groups we funded leveraged an additional €156 million. So that’s part of our partnership strategy, enabling people to participate in European or philanthropic programmes.

EUR: The challenge really is to fund research in a way that combines academic freedom with commercial impact?

MF: Sir Paul Nurse, the President of the Royal Society, has a wonderful description of how science should be funded, which I completely concur with. Effectively he likens funding scientific research to going back a few hundred years or so when people were exploring the world. If you were sitting in the Royal Geographical Society and you were going to launch an expedition, the first thing you need to know is where you’re going; are you going to the Amazon, the Arctic, the Antarctic? Then the second thing is you would find the best explorer, and fund that individual. Thirdly you would equip them with the best team of people, equipment and supplies. What you would not do is tell them how to get there. You wouldn’t tell them they have to go through this tributary or round that glacier that’s why you chose the best explorer. I like that, because it’s what we’re doing. With research prioritisation we’re saying; ‘here are areas that are important. Focus on having really good investigators, they’ll explore it.’ Then we focus on funding mechanisms which are about supporting young people, centres of excellence, infrastructure and projects. It’s an intelligent mix between scientists choosing what to research and being told where they should be looking.

www.sfi.ie

Dr Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

www.euresearcher.com

Activated carbons for toxin removal The adsorptive capacity of carbon materials for small molecules is well known. Dr Carol Howell and Dr Susan Sandeman tell us about research within the MEAD-ET and ACROBAT projects using a range of advanced, synthetically derived activated carbons with tailored surface properties and porosity to address a range of pressing healthcare challenges The surface chemistry

of carbon and its adsorptive capacity makes it well suited to a wide range of applications in adsorption therapy. However, the absence of an appropriate porous structure means that its ability to remove larger molecules, including a number of key biotoxins responsible for infection and inflammation, is limited. Activated carbons have long been used clinically to treat cases of poisoning; now researchers from the MEAD-ET and ACROBAT projects are investigating their capacity to address other major healthcare challenges including sepsis, and also kidney and liver failure. “The MEAD-ET project is looking at the activated carbon nano-structured materials produced by MAST Carbon International. We are aiming to develop them further and optimise their adsorption capacity through knowledge exchange,” says project coordinator Dr Carol Howell.

“The Institute of Experimental Pathology, Oncology and Radiobiology (IEPOR) in Ukraine have been working with activated carbon materials for some time and through our collaboration we aim to transfer their technology.”

an excellent training ground for participating researchers as they acquire a range of research experience generally unavailable in a single research centre,” says project coordinator Dr Susan Sandeman.

By controlling the porosity of the activated carbon material you can influence what size of molecules will be adsorbed. So if you’re looking to absorb a molecule of a particular size, you can actually tailor the size of the material’s pores so that the toxin will fit within it The overarching aim of the ACROBAT project meanwhile is to progress adsorbent medical device technology for a range of healthcare challenges through exchanging expert knowledge between industrial and academic partners. “The project provides

Activated carbon The carbon itself is activated by being heated at temperatures of up to 1000°C in CO2 or steam, a process which generates additional porosity in the material. Depending on the technique used this can

EU Research

The low magnification image on the left hand side shows the large transport channels into the carbon structure, and the high magnification image on the right demonstrate how toxin molecules can be adsorbed within the nanoporous structure of the activated carbon.

introduce porosity of up to 3,000 metres2 per gram, approximately half the surface area of a football pitch. Dr Howell says this vast surface area is one of the major attributes of the material, and is found not just on the outer surface of the carbon, but is inherent throughout the inner porous structure. “The type of porosity introduced into the material is an important consideration in terms of its ability to adsorb toxins. Micropores are below two nanometres (nm) in size, whereas mesopores range from 2-50 nm in size, while macropores are 50 nm and upwards,” she continues. “We have discovered that by introducing pores in the mesopore and small macropore size range there is a greater adsorption capacity for relatively large toxin molecules that standard carbons fail to remove.”

www.euresearcher.com

MEAD-ET Researchers in MEAD-ET are investigating the capacity of these activated carbon materials to absorb toxins associated with hepatic/renal insufficiency and sepsis. The project is using activated carbon produced from a phenol formaldehyde resin, which Dr Howell says holds some significant advantages over the carbons previously used, which were typically prepared from natural products such as coconut shells. “These carbons are very strong and hard, so they don’t release any microparticles that can lead to particle embolization, a serious clinical side effect of natural activated carbons. This means we can use them without any biocompatible coatings, such as cellulose, so the carbon retains its full adsorption

capacity,” she outlines. The material can be used in an extracorporeal device that works via a process called haemoperfusion, where toxic substances are removed from a patient’s blood whilst it is circulated externally through the adsorbent. Dr Howell and her colleagues in the MEAD-ET project are developing these adsorbents for various haemoperfusion applications. “We are introducing more porosity in the activation stage, and then attaching ligands to the surface of the carbon to make them more haemocompatible, so that when the blood comes into contact with the material it doesn’t cause any adverse reactions,” she explains. By attaching ligands to the surface of the material, researchers also aim to influence the amount and variety of

At a glance Full Project Title Novel medical adsorbents for extracorporeal treatment of life threatening conditions (MEAD-ET) Adsorbent carbons for the removal of biologically active toxins (ACROBAT) Project Objectives The main goal of the project is the development of a sorption device for the treatment of renal, hepatic, and multi organ failure (MOF) related to sepsis, used either in combination with dialysis apparatus, or separately, and containing coated or uncoated, new generation, carbon adsorbents which are able to effectively remove protein-bound toxins, bacterial toxins and inflammatory cytokines from patient blood. Project Partners School of Pharmacy & Biomolecular Sciences, University of Brighton, UK • The Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy, Université d’Auvergne Clermont-Ferrand -1, France • R.E.Kavetsky Institute of Experimental Pathology, Oncology and Radiobiology, Ukraine Contact Details Project Coordinator, Dr Carol Howell Dr Susan Sandeman T: +44 1273 2015 E: c.a.howell@brighton.ac.uk W: www.brighton.ac.uk/pharmacy/ research/groups/bmmd/acrobat/ Nanoporous activated carbon beads and monolithic columns as effective hemoadsorbents for inflammatory cytokines. Int J Artif Organs 2013; 36(9): 624 - 632

Dr’s Howell and Sandeman

toxins that are removed. “Activated carbon is a non-specific adsorbent, so it’s able to absorb a wide range of molecules - in that respect you can’t be too specific. But by controlling the porosity of the material you can influence to a certain degree what size molecule will be adsorbed. So if you’re looking to absorb a molecule of a particular size, you can tailor the size of the material’s pores so that the toxin will fit within it,” says Dr Howell. This approach could remove a wider range of toxins than current methods. While haemodialysis is highly effective at removing small water-soluble molecules and slightly larger molecules, Dr Howell says there are some toxins that it fails to remove. “Because dialysis works with a porous membrane of a certain cut-off, middle molecules (50060,000 Daltons) and protein-bound solutes are often poorly removed by current therapies,” she points out. There is a mounting body of evidence that these so called uremic molecules are detrimental to patients’ health and can have a severe impact on their quality of life. “Haemoperfusion using these tailored activated carbon adsorbents could be used in line with current dialysis therapy to remove these remaining uremic molecules and have a positive impact on the health of the current 1.9 million haemodialysis patients worldwide,” says Dr Howell. “To date our research has demonstrated that the carbons show good removal for a selection of these uremic molecules including; inflammatory cytokines and

protein bound indoles. Another possible use of the device is to treat conditions such as sepsis, where you get systemic inflammation and a cytokine storm. Reducing these excessive levels of cytokines could prove beneficial to the patient by returning their body to normal haemostasis.”

ACROBAT project The ACROBAT project advances some of the technology developed within MEADET and explores additional adsorbent designs and applications. The project compares different structural conformations and coatings, comparing bead and monolithic devices for assessment in models of liver and kidney failure. The monoliths are essentially extruded carbon tubes with microchannels running in parallel along their entire length, allowing fluid to flow. One of the main benefits of a monolithic system is a reduction in the pressure drop across the system which occurs when using beads. Activated carbon has a broadly acting adsorbent capacity which may be hugely beneficial in some medical applications such as sepsis where restricting excessive biotoxin exposure is essential. The project also addresses more selective removal of specific biotoxins using a model of Anthrax infection. The combined development of methods to attach and orientate bioligands on an adsorbent carbon or polymer composite surface offers an interesting approach to the treatment of such life-threatening infections.

Project Coordinator

Dr’s Howell and Sandeman are principal research fellows within the Biomaterials and Medical Devices research group (BioMED) at the University of Brighton, and have been working in the area of activated carbon adsorbents for the last decade. They have helped to investigate and validate the medical use of a new generation of activated carbon materials with unique structural properties that generate powerful adsorbents capable of adsorbing a range of biological toxin molecules.

EU Research

Training the next generation of scientists in antibiotic drug discovery Antibiotic resistance is a global threat to public health. There is an urgent need to discover new antibiotics as well as to develop alternative solutions for treatment of bacterial infections. TRAIN-ASAP is a Marie Curie Initial Training Network dedicated to the scientific and professional training of 12 young scientists in this area. The goal is to train the next generation of scientists able to bring new antimicrobial products to the market The health burden

of antibacterial resistance is rapidly increasing, as illustrated by the emergence of new strains that are resistant to multiple drugs, leaving both doctors and veterinarians with limited options to treat certain infections. Developing new antibiotics and non-antibiotic alternatives to kill resistant bacteria requires a new generation of trained personnel, which is the primary goal of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network TRAIN-ASAP (www. train-asap.eu). “TRAIN-ASAP is, first and foremost, a training programme”, says the project coordinator Prof. Luca Guardabassi, University of Copenhagen. “Our goal is to meet the demand for a new generation of scientists in this area through a unique training experience combining both academic and industrial work experience.”

Industry-academia alliance in the fight against antibiotic resistance The TRAIN-ASAP consortium is composed by four Universities (Copenhagen, Madrid, Wageningen and Warwick), the Veterinary and Agrochemical Research Centre in Brussels and three private companies, including one of the largest pharmaceutical company in the animal health sector (Zoetis, ex Pfizer Animal Health) and two SMEs (Ktedogen in Milan and Da Volterra in Paris). The three industrial partners are actively involved in the training activities by providing their expertise in drug development and marketing. “In the private sector there is an urgent need for competent scientists able to design and carry out innovative research in the area of antimicrobial discovery. We – academics – need the industry’s pragmatism to make sure that our research has a positive impact

on the society, without wasting energies and resources on ideas that have limited or no potential impact. This is a win-win situation” says Luca Guardabassi. The research training programme ranges from discovery of new natural or synthetic antibacterial drugs to optimization of antibiotic dosage and formulation. “We look for novel antibiotics produced by bacterial species that have not been studied before, including unculturable bacteria, as well as for new synthetic antimicrobial peptides. Antimicrobial peptides are small molecules that play an important role in the immune defence of eukaryotic organisms. Analogous compounds with improved antimicrobial activity and stability can be chemically produced in the lab” says Associate Professor Arshnee Moodley, who assists Luca Guardabassi in the coordination of the project.

The TRAIN-ASAP trainee group includes 12 young scientists originating from 9 countries (left to right): Ines Greco (Italy), João Cruz (Portugal), Mara Baldry (Greece), Andreas Hoefer (Germany), Muriel Breteau (France), Alberto Oddo (Italy), Chiara Borsetto (Italy), Rogier Gaiser (The Netherlands), Astrid Larberg (Sweden), Irene Mutuku (Kenya). Missing from the photo are Mouni Abdelli (Algeria) and Carmen Sadaka (Lebanon).

www.euresearcher.com

Antibiotic development is a very long and expensive process. Therefore, it is essential to improve or at least preserve the efficacy of existing antibiotics while we are waiting for new ones. “Optimization of formulation and dosage of the existing antibiotics is an essential feature in the fight against antibiotic resistance. The initial studies on antibiotic formulation and dosage were done many years ago. Today we have newer, more sensitive techniques that we can use to increase clinical efficacy and reduce antibiotic selection pressure on the gut microflora.”

New Antibacterial Strategies Several new antibacterial strategies are investigated in TRAIN-ASAP. “One of them is called anti-virulence therapy. Here we want to develop drugs able to prevent development of infection,” continues Arshnee Moodley. “For example, if you have Staphylococcus aureus sitting happily in your nose, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to cause infection. Something has to trigger the bacteria to suddenly start producing all of the factors that are required to cause infection. One way to fight bacteria is to prevent infection by inhibiting expression of certain virulence genes and toxins.”

A unique aspect of TRAIN-ASAP is the One-Health approach used to tackle the problem of antibiotic resistance. Use of antibiotics in animals is regarded as a possible source of antibiotic resistance in humans. In order to reduce veterinary use of antibiotics, some of the TRAIN-ASAP fellows are engaged in the discovery of alternative antibacterial solutions for treatment of bacterial infections in animals.

resistance genes by either mutation or horizontal gene transfer. They’re evolving and finding ways to beat us, so we’re always on the lookout for new ways to beat them.” This is very much an ongoing challenge. Bacteria adapt and evolve to their circumstances. In order to circumvent this problem, some of the TRAIN-ASAP fellows are trying to develop novel ways to target them. “Traditionally antimicrobial research

Bacteria are constantly evolving; every

time you apply a pressure they will find a way to beat it, so we’re always going to be on the lookout for new ways to beat them

Phage therapy, for example. “Bacteriophages are viruses that specifically infect and kill bacteria. In the past they have been widely used for antimicrobial therapy in the former Soviet Union. Today, with the problem of rising antibiotic resistance, researchers are looking at the therapeutic potential of phages again. In TRAIN-ASAP we want to develop two distinct phage cocktails to kill multidrug-resistant bacteria in dogs and poultry, respectively” says Arshnee Moodley. “We use cocktails because bacteria are super smart. If you apply a selection pressure, they evolve and readily develop

has focused almost exclusively on the discovery of new antibiotics able to kill bacteria. Now we’re looking at ways to prevent the resistance mechanism from being expressed. The key question is: can we block the protein or enzyme conferring resistance to restore antibiotic susceptibility?” she outlines. Thus, while some fellows are looking at developing compounds that specifically target bacterial resistance mechanisms, others are working on new compounds without prior knowledge of their mode of action. “Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to understand how bacterial

EU Research

resistance has developed. Figuring out the actual resistance mechanism can be very complex – it can take years,” says Arshnee Moodley. “So there are two strands to our work – we’re using the knowledge we have to identify possible targets for development of new antimicrobial compounds and at the same time we’re also developing drug leads with unknown mechanism of action – we just know that they kill the bacteria.”

Beyond Scientific Training The TRAIN-ASAP research programme includes not only scientific training, but also training in regulatory issues and other areas related to antibiotic approval and marketing. “Laboratory training is only part of the training programme. The fellows spend periods of training at the partner pharmaceutical companies to get hands on experience with legal and economic constraints related antibacterial drug discovery” continues Arshnee Moodley. “How do you get an antibiotic approved for human or veterinary use? How long and expensive is the process that brings new drugs from discovery to market? We think it’s really important that the fellows understand the complexity of the development and regulatory processes

behind approval of new antimicrobial drugs. It’s not just about what they do in the lab” The background to this work is the increasing concern around the issue of antibiotic resistance. We all develop infections at some point in our lives, and antibiotics are a crucial tool in treating them. “Since they were introduced around seventy or so years ago, antibiotics have led to a great increase in life expectancy. So they’re vitally important,” stresses Arshnee Moodley. However, the fight against resistant bacteria must encompass a wide range of actions and cannot be limited to development of new antibacterial products. “Rapid diagnostic tests to discriminate between bacterial and viral infections would represent an invaluable help to rationalize antibiotic prescription in primary health care and veterinary medicine. We also need to educate all parts involved (prescribers, patients, farmers and companion animal owners) that certain infections, such as viral or self-limiting infections, should not be treated with antibiotics.” These educational aspects and complementary skills related to communication, entrepreneurship and intellectual property rights are also covered in the training programme of TRAIN-ASAP.

At a glance Full Project Title Training and Research Aimed at Novel Antibacterial Solutions in Animals and People (TRAIN-ASAP) Project Objectives The objective of this TRAIN-ASAP is to fill the current gap between existing infections due to resistant bacteria and the strong need for alternative solutions to combat antibiotic resistance in both humans and animals. Project Funding TRAIN-ASAP is funded by the Marie Curie Actions under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development of the European Union. Project Coordinator Professor Luca Guardabassi Project Partners • Professor Patrick Butaye, Veterinary and Agrochemical Research Centre • Dr Stefano Donadio, Ktedogen • Dr Florence Séjourné, Da Volterra • Dr Jeffrey Watts, Zoetis • Professor Bruno Gonzalez Zorn, Universidad Complutense • Professor Elizabeth Wellington, University of Warwick • Professor Jerry Wells, Wageningen University Contact Details Associate Professor, Arshnee Moodley MSc (Med), PhD Department of Veterinary Biology University of Copenhagen Stigbøjlen 4, DK - 1870 Frederiksberg T: (+45) 35 33 27 11 E: asm@sund.ku.dk W: www.train-asap.eu

Arshnee Moodley MSc (Med), PhD

Arshnee Moodley is an Associate Professor in Antimicrobial Resistance at the Department of Veterinary Disease Biology, University of Copenhagen. Her research area is evolution and spread of antimicrobial resistance between animals and humans and more recently investigating non-antibiotic alternatives to treat infections caused by multi-drug resistant bacteria.

www.euresearcher.com

STOP study aims to monitor suicidality

Some children and adolescents suffer from conditions that leave them at a much higher risk of taking their own life, while the medication used to treat some other conditions may promote depression and suicidal thoughts. We spoke to Dr Paramala Santosh of the STOP study about their work to develop a set of web-based instruments to track suicidality over time Some children and

adolescents suffer from conditions that leave them at higher risk of taking their own life, while the medication used to treat some conditions may promote suicidal thoughts. As the coordinator of the STOP study, Dr. Paramala Santosh believes clinicians, patients and their families need more

complete questionnaires online in a secure system. The STOP suicidality related sideeffects questionnaire was developed building on analysis of a WHO database of all the reported side-effects of various medicines. “We aimed to understand which medicines had been associated with suicidality. Then we looked at the reported

In the STOP study we

have developed a set of web-based instruments using the HealthTrackerTM to be used with children and adolescents to monitor and track suicidality over time, which are currently being tested in a normal group and three patient populations information about medication-related suicidality. “In the STOP study we aim to develop a set of web-based instruments to be used with children and adolescents to monitor and track suicidality over time,” he says. These instruments will use a health monitoring web-based platform called HealthTrackerTM , which allows children, parents and clinicians to

literature as well as the side-effects which were also reported at the same time as the suicidality,” explains Dr. Santosh. “We ensured that all those side-effects were captured in a new instrument that we’ve developed as part of the STOP project, so that we could track the side-effects of medicines that themselves might increase the likelihood of suicidality.”

The project is developing three sets of instruments, best thought of as scales to assess the risk factors associated with suicidality, the side-effects of medication that are associated with suicidality and the measurement of suicidal thoughts and behaviours. In this latter area researchers are aiming to measure suicidality in terms of the ideas, behaviour, intent and lethality. “We’re looking at the intensity of the suicidal ideation and the suicidal behaviour. It might be that one individual is prone to self-harm without really intending to kill themselves, while another might genuinely want to commit suicide” outlines Dr. Santosh.” “We’d be able to differentiate between these cases. Ultimately we aim to classify them, almost like a green-amber-red classification,” continues Dr. Santosh. “With a web-based system we’d be able to set up alerts to clinicians. The STOP study is looking at treatment without changing current practice, but capacity will be there in the future, so that if a child went into the red

EU Research

Screenshots of the web-based HealthTrackerTM system showing child (Figure 1 and 3) and adolescent versions (Figure 2) of measures.

band, then the system could alert clinicians and action could be taken.”

Suicidal thoughts A wide variety of factors can lead to an individual developing suicidal thoughts, some of which may be related to their personal circumstances at the time and others to biological parameters. The project is looking at the biological, psychological and social mediators of suicidality, gathering information through questionnaires and physical data. “The biological workpackage is developing standard operating procedures to identify how genetic material can be gathered from children without distressing them. We’ve found that we can extract good quality DNA from saliva,” says Dr. Santosh. There

www.euresearcher.com

are also social and psychological mediators of suicidality, such as cyberbullying. “We have developed an entirely new suite of measures of suicidality,” continues Dr. Santosh. “We aim to see whether these risk factors differ in four different cohorts – the first is normal controls, then we’re looking at kids with no mental health problem but rather a physical illness, like bronchial asthma or an allergy. The third group is kids with depression, who are at increased risk of suicidality. The fourth group is children with a condition which requires treatment with anti-psychotics, but which are unlikely by themselves to increase the risk of suicidality, such as autism, Tourette’s syndrome, challenging behaviour, or another similar condition”.

Of the individuals suffering from depression, half will be treated with a psychological intervention such as cognitive behavioural therapy and half with fluoxetine. “We’re looking to see whether we can track suicidality in this group of individuals who, because of their mental health problem, may be more prone to suicidal thoughts,” continues Dr. Santosh. “In the group of individuals who have bronchial asthma or respiratory allergy and are being prescribed medicines for that, around half of the kids will be on montelukast, a medicine which some people have claimed may have some sort of relationship to suicidality, but nothing has been definitely proved so far.” The patients will be followed up at

At a glance Full Project Title Suicidality: Treatment Occuring in Paediatrics (STOP) Project Objectives The STOP project aims to develop a comprehensive web-based methodology for the assessment and monitoring of suicidality in children and adolescents. Project Participants KCL (Dr Paramala Santosh, Dr Sarah Curran) • HealthTracker Ltd (Mr Nick Penkov) • FCRB (Dr Josefina Castro-Fornieles) • CIBERSAM (Dr Celso Arango) • CHU Montpellier (Prof Diane Purper Ouakil) • UCL (Dr Alastair Sutcliffe, Dr Macey Murray) • RUNMC (Prof Jan Buiteraar) • UMCG (Dr Pieter Hoekstra) • CIMH (Prof Ralf Dittmann) • UULM (Dr Ulrike Schulze) • UNIVDUN (Dr David Coghill) • APHP (Dr Philippe Gallula) • UNICA (Prof Alessandro Zuddas) • INSERM (Prof Bruno Falissard) • UoA, Alberta (Prof Kathy Aitchison) • Concentris (Dr Ameli Schwalber) Contact Details Project Coordinator, Dr Paramala J Santosh, Dip NB (Psych), MD, PhD, FRCPsych Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, PO85| Institute of Psychiatry| 16 De’Crespigny Park | London | SE5 8AF T: +020 3228 3900 E: paramala.1.santosh@kcl.ac.uk W: http://www.stop-study.com/ Paramala J Santosh (M.D., Ph.D., FRCPsych)

eight points over a 52-week period to assess any development in terms of suicidal ideation, while researchers will also work with 250 children in the general population. This latter group will be followed up three times over the same period, giving researchers a clear overview of the progression of any suicidal thoughts in general populations. “We’ll be in a position to map the progression across different groups,” says Dr Santosh. This will give Dr Santosh and his colleagues a sound basis to assess whether their web-based

The ultimate aim in this work is to develop a pharmacovigilance tool that could be used to assess the safety of new drugs emerging onto the market. An effective web-based system such as the HealthTrackerTM system will also give clinicians relevant information before they see the patient, enabling them to use contact time with families more effectively. “If the patient has done their questionnaire at home then the clinician already has the results in front of them. The clinician can clearly see if a patient’s sleep has worsened for example, as they

With a web-based system we’d be able to set up alerts to clinicians. The STOP study is looking at treatment

without changing current practice system is as reliable as the current gold standard, the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale. “We’re trying to see whether the instruments can be used across a wide range of patient populations and normal populations,” he outlines. “If our instruments are good enough then the HealthTrackerTM system will develop them into a small, compact web-based solution to be used for pharmacovigilance in the future. We would want it to be simple to use, so that patients, parents and clinicians would all be able to use it. The system is web-based, so we hope it will be easy to use and become part and parcel of clinical practice.”

can track it across time,” points out Dr. Santosh. While the current research focus is very much on mental health in children and adolescents, as they grew older they may of course need further treatment, an area which Dr. Santosh and his colleagues plan to explore in future. “We’ve received a grant to develop a web-based solution using the HealthTrackerTM system to identify whether an adolescent patient needs to be transferred to an adult mental health team (MILESTONE project). This will allow the clinicians and the adolescent team to decide appropriate transition plans and explore the quality and success of transfer to the adult team or other providers” he explains.

Project Coordinator

Paramala J Santosh (M.D., Ph.D., FRCPsych) is Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatrist, and Head of the Centre for Interventional Paediatric Psychopharmacology (CIPP), Maudsley Hospital, and a Visiting Reader at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, UK. He has been involved in medication trials in children and adolescents with ADHD, Conduct Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder, and is active in measurement and health outcome research, acquired brain injury and metabolic syndromes, and has published widely.

Funded by EC FP7 under grant agreement No 261411.

EU Research

Attracting foreign investment into Ireland Attracting foreign investment is crucial to the health of the Irish economy, providing jobs, generating taxes and encouraging new companies into the country. We spoke to Brendan McDonagh, Manager of the Business Intelligence Unit at Ireland’s Investment and Development Agency (IDA) about their strategy to attract new investment into Ireland

ncouraging foreign companies to invest in Ireland is a priority for the Irish Government as the economy continues to recover from the financial crisis. With over 1,000 foreign-owned companies currently operating in Ireland the country has a strong track record as a business location, and the Irish Investment and Development Agency (IDA) is working to attract further investment. “The primary attraction of Ireland as a business location is the availability of a skilled workforce, the technology base that’s already here and the track record,” says Brendan McDonagh, Manager of the IDAs Business Intelligence Unit. The IDA’s primary role is to attract investment into Ireland; the main driving force in this is the talent base, after which companies consider other factors. “We see it as a three tier structure. You start with the three Ts – talent, technology and track record. If you satisfy that they then look at the tax environment, then they start to look at sector-specific issues,” continues McDonagh.

Attracting investment The IDAs work combines attracting new companies into Ireland and encouraging those already in the country to expand their operations. Last year about 60 companies opened in Ireland for the first time, while the IDA also has a team that works with already established companies to grow and expand their mandate. “We are constantly looking to increase their job numbers and increase their economic activity and spend in the economy,” outlines McDonagh. These companies make a major contribution to the Irish economy, both in terms of their overall tax contribution and in the employment they offer, so keeping them in Ireland is a real priority. “The IDAs clients are responsible for about 70 per cent of Ireland’s exports, two-thirds of the

R & D spend and over two-thirds of corporate tax. They employ in the order of 250,000 people, directly and indirectly,” says McDonagh. This includes both major multi-nationals and also less well-known companies that offer great potential for growth. Recently the IDA has set up a team to focus on attracting these emerging companies into Ireland. “We’re targeting fast-growing smaller companies, in the technology space in particular. Last year we brought in over 20 of those companies. We identify a new sector, go after the big name

The IDAs clients are responsible for about 70 per cent of Ireland’s exports, twothirds of the research and development spend and over two-thirds of corporate tax. They employ in the order of 250,000 people, directly and indirectly companies in it and bring in the top-tier companies. Then we go after the medium and then smaller companies in that sector – we have a very targeted approach,” explains McDonagh. The region around Dublin is highly attractive to business, but McDonagh says investment is spread across the country. “We’ve got a strong medical device sector based in western Galway, a strong pharmaceutical cluster based in Cork, in the south of the country, and a strong technology sector based around Limerick,” he stresses.

EU Research

Foreign investment The domestic economy in Ireland has been badly affected by the economic crisis over the last few years, and also the slow pace of growth internationally. By contrast the foreign investment sector has generally performed very strongly; there was a slow down between 2008 and 2010, but McDonagh says that was primarily because of global market conditions. “Foreign companies are not coming here to supply or support the domestic market, because our population is only 4.5 million. So the performance of the domestic economy is not directly related to the performance of foreign investment,” he explains. Traditionally, McDonagh says Ireland has positioned itself as a good place for US multi-nationals to support the European market, taking advantage of its proximity to important markets and the strong cultural affinity. “We speak English, have good time zone links with them and a good cost base. So that was the initial environment,” he explains. The US is still a major source of investment in the Irish economy, along with Germany, France and the UK, but the IDA is also looking for other sources. Recently the IDA has helped a number of European companies establish a base in Ireland, in many cases to support non-European business, while they are also looking further afield. “More recently we’ve added on growth markets – we’ve opened new offices in India, China, Brazil, Russia and Korea, and we’re looking to expand our offices in those regions,” says McDonagh. The growing economic power of these nations is well documented; by establishing strong links at this relatively early stage, McDonagh believes Ireland can put itself in a strong position to capitalise as they develop further. “We’re trying to get in early and establish those links, so that as the investment starts to flow we’re well positioned,” he outlines.

www.euresearcher.com

These new growth markets are central to the IDAs five year strategy published in 2010. Over the period between 2010-2014 the IDA is looking to create 105,000 jobs in Ireland through foreign investment, while further ambitious targets have been set. “We aim to bring in 640 investments, and we’re looking for 20 per cent of our greenfield investments to come from those new growth markets,” says McDonagh. Along with areas like technology, life sciences and financial services, in which Ireland has an established record of attracting investment, the IDA is working to identify new growth areas and forms of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). “We’re going through a number of international reports and are also looking at databases which provide lists of sectors offering growth opportunities,” says McDonagh. “We’re hoping to identify some niche areas that we could develop a proposition for, and then go into the marketplace and see whether we can attract some companies from those sectors.ഀᴠ A key factor in this is again the talent available and their ability to provide a good service, whether it be in technology, life sciences or any other sector. Nowadays companies invest in people much more than physical assets, so an educated workforce is crucial to attracting foreign investment. “In that sense the ability to attract and retain talent is the key driver of whether companies stay or not. We see companies coming here and finding Ireland a good place to attract and retain that talent. In the past it was a physical investment, now it’s much more of a talent investment,” explains McDonagh.

www.idaireland.com 41

LivingLab builds bridges between stakeholders Regular collaboration between producers and end-users can guide the development of a product or service, helping companies optimise the design before it reaches the market. Dr Mojca Gabrovšek of the CentraLab project tells us about their work to develop an online ecosystem for territorial innovation The opinions of end-users hold great value in the development of any product or service, as feedback can be used to optimise the design before it reaches the market. However, some companies have in the past put products on the market without detailed knowledge of the needs of end-users, an issue the CentraLab project is working to address. “The CentraLab project enables three-way collaboration between companies, local authorities and the end-users,” outlines Dr Mojca Gabrovšek, of the Faculty of Organisational Sciences at the University of

Maribor. The project brings together partners from across Europe in this work, covering a range of different products, services and business models. “In Slovenia we’re looking at ecotourism in Goriška, which is one of our most important regions for tourism, we’re building a platform for that. Our Italian partners are focusing on how municipalities can save energy, in Austria they’re working with electric cars, while in Poland they’re creating networks for SME’s. So there’s a whole range of projects,” continues Dr Gabrovšek.

Closer collaboration The common theme across these areas is a commitment to closer collaboration between the organisations and people involved in development, including researchers, firms and public institutions. The CentraLab project provides a platform to engage all these actors throughout the product development process, enabling experimentation and co-creation through the LivingLab ecosystem. “We talk regularly to end-users and also with the relevant authorities via workshops,” says Dr Gabrovšek. This will educate endusers about the product development

The tourists can upload their own experiences and paths that they have used, seen and liked. They are sharing it with on the one hand other tourists, but on the other

they’re also telling the official tourist service providers about what they would actually like to see

EU Research

process and help them offer constructive feedback, although Dr Gabrovšek says it is still important to consider their level of technical knowledge. “You need to be happy with the point that you’re at, that you know end-users will understand what they’re looking at. If you bring them in too soon then feedback will not necessarily be valid, because they may not understand the whole process,” she points out. “On the other hand, if you bring them in too late then you may have to go back a certain number of steps to change things.” This kind of collaboration can build traction for the product and enhance its prospects of long-term success. For the project’s Italian partners, who are focusing on climate change, it’s also about trying to convince municipalities that they can reduce costs through introducing new technology. “They’re looking at things like public lighting, buildings and heating, as these are some of the highest cost areas. The heating and cooling of large buildings has a major impact on CO2 emissions in particular,” explains Dr Gabrovšek. The LivingLab concept provides a platform to address these issues, part of the wider goal of transforming central Europe into a hub

www.euresearcher.com

of technical innovation. Dr Gabrovšek says the main challenge so far has been ensuring that the LivingLab is attractive and easy to use. “The issues tend to arise when you let the users work in the way they want to work. But so far things have

run pretty smoothly – we’ve decided on what we think will be the best technical solution, which we’re now preparing. When this has been finalised we will run workshops to see if we can improve it further.”

Screenshot of the Go Gorenjska homepage.

At a glance Full Project Title CentraLab – Central European Living Lab for Territorial Innovation Project Objectives A coordinated set of trans-national pilot projects that build partnerships, specify ICT platforms and services, and co-design innovative approaches for ten issues of shared concern: * Eco-tourism, * Energy, * Micro-SME Networks, * Media & Creativity, * Mobility, * Environment & Education, * Climate Change, * Waste Management, * Rural Development, * eHealth Consortium Leader E-ZAVOD, Institute for Comprehensive Development Solutions Čučkova ul. 5, 2250 Ptuj, Slovenija Project Funding ERDF funding: €2,515,464 Contact Details Project Researcher, Dr Mojca Gabrovšek, MBA University of Maribor Faculty of Organizational Sciences Kidričeva cesta 55a, 4000 Kranj, Slovenija T: +386 4 2374 281 E: mojca.gabrovsek@fov.uni-mb.si W: www.centralivinglab.eu W: www.fov.um.si

Andreja Pucihar

Project Coordinator

Andreja Pucihar is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Organizational Sciences, University of Maribor, Slovenia, having gained her PhD in Management Information Systems there in 2002. Her main interest is in how the implementation of innovative ICT affects organizations, government, ICT industry, universities and society as a whole.

The CentraLab team This represents a new way of working which will fundamentally change the relationship between producer and enduser. Incorporating feedback from enduers will make the relationship much more dynamic and give the end-user more of a stake in development. “We expect people to have a lot more joy in using the product and that they will be a lot more proactive, because they’ll be more closely involved in its development,” says Dr Gabrovšek. In Slovenia, Dr Gabrovšek and her colleagues are developing a portal which will allow both tourist service providers and members of the public to upload information. “The tourists can upload their own experiences and paths that they have used, seen and liked. They are sharing it with on the one hand other tourists, but on the other they’re also telling the official tourist service providers about what they would actually like to see, and what they thought was missing,” she continues. “Our goal is to get the tourist service providers to take note of what end-users are telling them.”

Slovenia tourism A lot of tourists visiting Goriška of course want to see the major attractions like Lake Bled and enjoy the spectacular scenery, but Dr Gabrovšek says there are many other places worth visiting in the region as well. The portal can be an effective way to publicise these less well-known attractions and help tourist service providers respond to the opinions of the tourists. “We’re trying to connect

the different regions of Goriška, the different towns, and to strengthen the collaboration between them. So instead of just seeing the main tourist attractions that everyone sees, you get an overview of the whole region and what it has to offer. Hopefully the tourists will see more of the country,” says Dr Gabrovšek. “It’s historically been very hard to do something like this, but we’ve had very good feedback. The tourist service providers know what they offer, they know that people want to come to Goriška and they know what they’re selling. They weren’t really trying by themselves to expand their offer, but as soon as we proposed this portal they were really excited.” The original platform is currently being upgraded with the project working on the design and aiming to encourage even more tourist service providers to use the portal. While the initial focus is on developing the portal for Slovenian tourism companies, Dr Gabrovsek says in future she would like to develop a pan-European website. “You would have one portal where you would have countries that have very unique landscapes. So for example, Gorenjska is mountainous, green and forested, with these amazing lakes, while other countries have completely different landscapes,” she says. “The main challenge at the beginning would be finding the right partners, but I think people are keen to collaborate. The first hurdle would be finding the financial support needed to pull it together.”

EU Research

Nuclear power offers a relatively clean, sustainable source of energy, but it does generate waste that needs to be carefully managed, often in specially engineered repositories in deep geological environments. We spoke to Dr Richard P. Shaw of the FORGE project about this including their research into the behaviour of gases in and around these repositories, work which has important safety implications

Gas research crucial to safe storage of radioactive waste Nuclear power generates less carbon emissions than many other sources of energy and offers a sustainable way of meeting long-term demand. However, nuclear power does create radioactive waste that needs to be carefully managed, a context in which the work of the FORGE project takes on real importance. “The project aims to improve our understanding of the behaviour of gases in relation to the repositories used for the deep geological disposal of radioactive waste,” says Doctor Richard Shaw of the British Geological Survey, the project’s scientific coordinator. This gas can be generated in a number of ways, including metal corrosion and degradation of cellulosic waste. “Quite a lot of work had been done on gas generation before FORGE started so we concentrated mainly on how the gas would move from the engineered part of the repository system and out into the surrounding host rocks,” continues Dr Shaw. “The materials used in a repository depend on the types of waste and the host rocks; they might be bentonite-based clay barriers, they might be cementbased backfill. Although we concentrated on those two, there are also other materials used as barriers.”

first place. “Say that gas is being generated by the corrosion of a metal – if that corrosion happens slowly then that gas is generated over quite a long period of time. ‘So it has time to disperse slowly,” explains Dr Shaw. “However, if corrosion happens quickly you have a much more

rapidly generation of gas over a much shorter period of time. So while the total gas volume will be the same, generating it over several hundred years could potentially have a much more significant impact than if it was generated over several thousand years.”

Gas injection experiment, Joseph URF

Gas migration The project has been looking at how gases would move through repository materials, as well as the disturbed and undisturbed rock around it. This kind of information is central to the design of the repository, and ensuring that radioactive waste is managed safely. “The repository system needs to be designed in such a way that the gas can slowly move through it without significant disruption of the system,” says Dr Shaw. This is an enormously complex area, and several areas of uncertainty remain, one of which is how quickly gas will be created in the

www.euresearcher.com

Construction of a new gallery using a tunnel boring machine, Bure Underground Research Laboratory, France, June 2013 (BGS).

Fluid injection into mudstone sample: Schematic of the rig (top), photograph of shear surface after completion of test, scanned image of the post test sample and flow model of flow through the fracture at the end of the test (bottom) (BGS).

There are also many uncertainties over how gas moves through geological material, in particular how it creates and exploits pathways. Until recently, most modelling of gas migration was based on what’s called two-phase flow theory (where gas and fluid move through the pore spaces in the material), but Dr Shaw says evidence from FORGE suggests that in some circumstances gas actually flows through individual dilatant pathways. “Gas flows through discrete pathways rather than the rock mass as a whole, which has implications for how it moves through rock, and therefore how you model it. These individual dilatant pathways are much harder to model than two-phase flow,” he explains. Once researchers understand the detail, they can then work out how to apply that to bigger volumes of rock. “In FORGE we’ve run several experiments in laboratory settings, along with some experiments that have been done at a much larger scale,” continues Dr Shaw. “The project has performed experiments in underground research laboratories in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden and the Czech Republic. These experiments have been done in situ at the kinds of depths used for the disposal of radioactive waste.” Researchers have been looking at a number of issues in these experiments. In Sweden, scientists are investigating how pathways develop in bentonite, using a full-scale mock-up of the system. “Our French, Belgian and Swiss partners are also undertaking experiments in their underground research labs, looking at how gas from boreholes will travel through the rockmass to adjacent or nearby boreholes, over scales of a few metres through clay rocks. Our partners in the Czech Republic have been looking at similar questions with granite-type rock,” says Dr Shaw. All the sites being used in this research are well-characterised geologically, which Dr Shaw says is very helpful in terms of the project’s experimental work. “We understand the variability of the rocks. They may look fairly similar, but they have quite a lot of subtle differences. It could be small changes in grain sizes, it might be sandy lenses in different clays – these issues could be important in terms of how the gas might migrate through the rock,” he says.

EU Research

Radioactive waste The composition of the radioactive waste itself can vary widely, depending on a range of factors, including how the fuel was originally used and whether the spent fuel was re-processed. Many countries, including France and the UK, re-process a lot of their spent fuel, which gives rise to three different types of radioactive waste; high-level, intermediate and low-level. “The high-level waste is liquid to start with – both France and the UK have been vitrifying that waste for quite a long time. So it’s turned into borosilicate glass,” explains Dr Shaw. The intermediate-level waste is comprised of a lot of reactive metals that will generate carbon dioxide and methane when they degrade; waste is also generated when a nuclear power station is de-commissioned. “This includes things like the graphite that is part of the

like Russia, France and the UK were designed to produce lots of plutonium. So you get all sorts of differences as a result of that, that make some materials harder to deal with geologically,” says Dr Shaw. Gases can potentially be generated from both the radioactive waste, and the materials used in the repository. “Even materials like copper, which was chosen by the Swedes and the Finns because it’s relatively corrosion-resistant, may eventually corrode and produce some hydrogen,” continues Dr Shaw. “After the copper has corroded in some part and water has got into the inside part of the canister - which it will - the fuel rod cladding and the cast-iron parts of the system will corrode quicker.” These are important considerations in terms of assessing the performance of a repository. Researchers have developed

The repository system needs to be designed in such a way that the gas can slowly move through it rather than build up pressure, so that it doesn’t disrupt the system cores in some reactor designs, all the contaminated bits of reactor vessel and so on. Most of these materials, at the time they’re de-commissioned, will probably be in the intermediate-level waste category, so overall it’s quite a complex picture,” explains Dr Shaw. The lower level waste includes contaminated laboratory equipment, clothes and some medical waste, less active materials which can be disposed of in a near-surface environment. There are also different types of reactors, some of which were originally used for military purposes, which adds a further layer of complexity. “The early reactors in places

models to assess how effectively a repository will contain the radioactivity placed within it, typically over a period of about a million years. “The timescale does vary a bit, depending on the country and their regulations, but most countries usually look for a performance assessment over about a million years,” says Dr Shaw. “FORGE has undertaken experiments and modelling that provides information and understanding that will be used in repository designs and their performance assessment to help ensure that deep geological repositories will provide a safe means for the long term management of radioactive waste” Dr Shaw concludes.

At a glance Full Project Title Fate of Repository Gases (FORGE) Project Objectives The FORGE project was a pan-European project with links to international radioactive waste management organisations, regulators and academia, specifically designed to tackle the key research issues associated with the generation and movement of repository gasses with partners from 24 organisations in 12 European countries. Project Funding FORGE is funded under the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) under Grant Agreement No 230357, the FORGE project, who provides 50% of the €12m Euro budget. Contact Details Project Coordinator, Dr Richard P. Shaw JHB1 British Geological Survey Environmental Science Centre Keyworth Nottingham NG12 5GG T: +44 (0) 115 9363545 E: rps@bgs.ac.uk W: www.FORGEproject.org

Dr Richard P. Shaw

Project Coordinator

Dr Richard Shaw is a mining geologist (C. Geol; Eur. Geol) with over 22 years’ experience in radioactive waste management. He has extensive knowledge of potential UK geologies for deep geological disposal of radioactive waste with particular emphasis on their geological characteristics, site characterisation and potential geological issues.

Participants at the second FORGE General Assembly hosted by the Czech Technical University in Prague after a visit the Josef underground research facility (Photo - CTU).

www.euresearcher.com

A wide variety of soil-borne parasites can be found on olive trees all round the Mediterranean basin, which can affect the local crop. Thierry Mateille, senior scientist at IRD and coordinator of the PESTOLIVE project, tells us about their work in developing new ecological approaches to manage soil-borne parasites, which will also help reduce the use of pesticides A wide variety of soil-borne parasites are found on olive trees all round the Mediterranean basin, in particular soilborne parasites such as nematodes and fungi, which can affect the local crop. The PESTOLIVE project is developing methods aimed at managing these parasites more effectively, which will also offer an alternative to the use of pesticides. “The goal is to apply new approaches on olive cropping systems, in order to control the soil-borne pests found on plants,” outlines Thierry Mateille, the project’s coordinator. Olives are a common crop all round the Mediterranean basin, but information about soil-borne parasites tends to be specific to each individual country. “The first basic question is: what is the effect of the diversity of these soil-borne parasites around the Mediterranean basin on olive trees?” says T. Mateille. “The second question is, how is the development of these soil-borne parasites related to the history of olives around the Mediterranean basin? Relic olive trees first grew in spots as in Morocco and Turkey, and today all the olive cultivars around the Mediterranean basin come from these spots.”

PESTOLIVE Project Partners : France • IRD • CNRS / UPS • Montpellier SUPAGRO / Greece • NAGREF / Italy • IAMB • IPP-CNR / Morocco • IAV • INRA • UCAM-FSTG • UIZFSA • UAE-FST / Spain • IAS-CSIC • IFAPA / Tunisia • INAT • IO • ISA / Turkey • BATEM • ZAIM Thierry Mateille, IRD, UMR Centre de Biologie pour la Gestion des Populations, Campus de Baillarguet - CS 30016 34988 Montferrier-sur-Lez Cedex - France www.arimnet.net Thierry MATEILLE is a senior scientist from IRD. His researches are devoted to plant-parasitic nematodes, in Mediterranean ecosystems and crops. In order to develop new control strategies through biodiversity conservation approaches, his interest is focused on responses of parasite community patterns to evolution and environmental forces.

Helicotylenchus

Biodiversity The soil that was used for propagation during olive domestication was of course the soil found in the surrounding area. As people began to travel further afield, trade links grew and new techniques were developed, so soil was introduced from other, more distant areas, resulting in two different kinds of soil-borne parasite biodiversity. “There’s the native biodiversity, then there’s the ‘new’ diversity, with exchanges of infested rooted cuttings and the development of soil-borne parasites because of new technologies like new cropping systems and improved irrigation,” explains T. Mateille. Different control strategies have been developed around the Mediterranean basin, but T. Mateille says they didn’t take the true diversity of the parasite population into account. “In the project we have two main axes; one is about biodiversity, and how that develops over time, with the evolution of olive trees by domestication,” he continues. “We aim to control these soil-borne parasites – not only a few dangerous species, but to control this overall biodiversity in order to lead it not to be pathogenic. That is also a very important issue, because we can link agronomical questioning with ecological questioning.” It is of course not possible to eradicate all soil-borne parasites, so researchers aim rather to control their population and try to maintain a healthy balance. One possible solution is to control the biodiversity of the soil, which by extension will help control soil-borne parasites

through a biodiversity conservation approach. “If we increase the biodiversity of parasites, in fact we increase competition between them,” explains T. Mateille. The parasites compete for trophic resources, the available energy and nutrients, which they need to survive and reproduce. “Take for example a piece of root – if all the parasites on the piece of root want to survive it means that they have to trade between themselves. However, if all the parasites accept this trade between themselves, they also accept that they will not reproduce a lot – there’s an energy balance between survival and reproduction,” says T. Mateille. “Then also, among each group of soil-borne parasites, some of them will be bigger, some of them will have different reproduction times. So competition is not just between parasites with the same biology - these soil-borne parasites are very biologically diverse.” The olives themselves are also extremely diverse, including both wild and cropped olives, and the project has a workpackage investigating this diversity. The ultimate goal is to produce knowledge and tools to manage parasites more effectively, bringing together information from across the Mediterranean basin. “It’s very important to gather all the available information in one database - that’s the first tool we’re developing,” outlines T. Mateille. “Then we’re also developing tools for diagnosing biodiversity, especially for countries which don’t have up-to-date tools as molecular techniques. We would like to propose some routine diagnostic tools for scientists, either for olives or for soil-borne parasites. Third, we want to change some pest control paradigms taking into account the management of their biodiversity.” 1. The “Institut de Recherche pour le Développement” is a French research organisation, that focus its research on the relationship between man and its environment, in Africa, Mediterranean, Latin America, Asia and the French tropical overseas territories (www.ird.fr). 2. The PESTOLIVE project “Contribution of olive history for the management of soil-borne parasites in the Mediterranean basin” is funded by ARIMNet (Coordination of the Agricultural Research in the Mediterranean Area, www.arimnet.net). It involves 18 research teams from 7 Mediterranean countries.

The goal is to apply new approaches on olive cropping systems, in order to control the soil-borne pests found on plants 48

EU Research

Studying individual microwave photons The SINGLEOUT project aims to develop a measurement device for single microwave photons. This work could be an important step towards quantum information processing and other practical applications, as project coordinator Doctor Mikko Möttönen explains Techniques derived from

the field of circuit quantum electrodynamics offer new opportunities to detect photons at low frequencies, which could be an important step towards quantum information processing applications. With circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit QED) researchers can look at microwavefrequency photons instead of optical photons, which Doctor Mikko Möttönen says offers some important advantages. “We think that microwave frequencies offer great benefits over the optical frequencies because we can use off-theshelf microwave components together with special superconducting electronics,” he outlines. Based at Aalto University in Finland, Doctor Möttönen is the coordinator of the SINGLEOUT project, which aims to build a detector for single microwave photons. “We plan to study individual microwave photons in superconducting waveguides. The research could lead to a measurement device for single microwave photons, which could possibly be used in future for quantum information and processing applications,” he continues. “The single

www.euresearcher.com

photons themselves could be used as quantum bits in a photonic quantum computer, and this single-photon detector could be used as a device to measure these quantum bits (qubits).”

Microwave photons The framework of this research is circuit QED, which means that common electric circuits behave quantum mechanically. Typically in circuit QED, a single photon

microwave photons can also be coupled to superconducting qubits. “These qubits are essentially two-state quantum systems, which means that they are very non-linear but at the same time do not absorb photons, a type of component which is lacking for optical frequencies. Of course single atoms are also nonlinear elements, because they may have only a couple of states that are coupled with the photonic field,” continues Doctor

It is possible to couple the top and bottom wire of the pair such that half the photon is in the bottom wire and half in the top wire, which is called a superposition state. You would call this operation a single qubit quantum gate confined in a cavity is coupled to an artificial atom. The resulting interactions give researchers the opportunity to study single microwave photons. “Using circuit QED we can really study individual microwave photons, which we can control accurately even with off-the-shelf commercial components,” says Doctor Möttönen. On the other hand these

Möttönen. “The difference between the microwave photons and the optical photons in this sense is that the qubits that serve as artificial atoms in the microwave regime can be coupled with these microwave photons in a much stronger way, relatively orders of magnitude stronger, than the atoms can be coupled to the optical photons.”

1µm

(Gray-scale figure above) Nanoscale resistor coupled to a superconducting resonator (not shown) through the horizontal leads. (3D blue image right) Three-dimensional illustration of a silicon chip with a microwave resonator and two embedded resistors. (2D blue image top right) Top view of the microwave resonator with embedded resistors.

Researchers can also tune and engineer artificial atoms to develop specific properties, which is not possible with natural atoms. For example, researchers can change the magnetic field near such an artificial atom, thereby changing its properties. “Circuit QED brings us lots of tools that we can use to control these microwave photons,” says Doctor Möttönen. However, detecting single photons in the microwave regime remains a major challenge; while there is a good source of single photons, Doctor Möttönen says it’s important to also have an effective detector. “If we don’t have a single-shot measurement

of the state of the photonic qubit, it’s not a very effective quantum computer. We can test and detect stuff without this singlephoton detector, to some extent, but we can’t really build a large-scale quantum computer,” he explains. There is an effective single-photon source in the microwave regime, which is an important step towards quantum processing applications, as researchers can couple these microwave photons to nonlinear elements that essentially don’t exist in the optical regime. However, Dr Möttönen says the toolbox is not yet complete. “At the moment we don’t have a detector capable of

detecting these single microwave photons – that’s the main thing that I want to build, to complete the toolbox in a way. Furthermore, nobody has yet showed how to couple two freely moving single photons together accurately, to achieve the desired photon-photon interaction,” he says. The high quality of non-linear elements in the microwave regime offers good opportunities to design a coupler. This could be an important step towards the development of a large-scale quantum computer using these microwave photons, yet Dr Möttönen’s current focus is on more immediate objectives. “Once we get this

EU Research

single-photon detector working we plan to test it in some simple schemes, where we will use it to measure the state of a single qubit, a single freely-moving microwave photon qubit,” he outlines. The project is also studying ways to manipulate and control these photons. “The way a single photon quantum computer works is this. Picture four horizontal wires, or superconducting waveguides through which optical photons travel, where the upper two wires correspond to one qubit, and the bottom two wires correspond to another qubit,” continues Dr Möttönen. “Then you feed in a single photon to one wire of the upper pair, and to one wire in the bottom pair. For example, if you feed in a photon to the top wire in the upper pair, and then to the top wire of the bottom pair, then you could say; ‘ok, now we have initialised the photonic quantum computer into this state, zero-zero - basically the qubit state zero means that the photon is in the top wire of the pair.”

Quantum computer A quantum computer is not restricted in the same sense as a classical computer, so in future it could potentially solve some problems much faster. “You don’t necessarily need as many computational steps in the quantum computer because the rules are different, allowing for shortcuts,” says Dr Möttönen. There is still some way to go before quantum computers enter the commercial mainstream though, and debate is continuing about how they could be used. “Some people think that quantum computers, at least when they are first applied commercially, could be specialised computers, used only for certain particularly complex problems,” continues Dr Möttönen. “Maybe it would be a cloud service, so there would be a quantum computer in a distant data center, and you would send this quantum computer a computational task via the internet, then you would get the answer in

We plan to study individual

microwave photons in superconducting waveguides. The research could lead to a

measurement device for single microwave photons, which could possibly be used in future for quantum information processing applications From this point researchers can use standard microwave techniques. It is possible to couple the top and bottom wire of the pair such that half the photon is in the bottom wire and half in the top wire, which is called a superposition state. “You would call this operation a single qubit quantum gate. People have divided photons already using 50-50 beamsplitters in the microwave regime however, they have not been able to measure the state in a single shot. It’s also possible to create a phase-shift gate, which does not change the distribution of the photon in the top and bottom wires, but how the relative phase is arranged,” says Dr Möttönen. These phase differences are very important in quantum computers which, unlike classical computers, use quantum mechanics to solve problems. “Quantum mechanics is a more general theory than classical mechanics. Quantum computers don’t have to obey the same rules and restrictions as classical computers – the rules of computation are more relaxed,” explains Dr Möttönen. “Everything that you could do with a classical computer, you can in principle do with a quantum computer. The question is that when do you get quantum speed-up.”

www.euresearcher.com

reasonable time. In this way you could speed up your computation. Also, some people think that a quantum computer could be used as a separate module in a classical computer, similar to how graphics processing units are currently used.” These ideas may well change once quantum computers enter common usage, but for now they are mainly limited to some small-scale prototypes in research laboratories. Quantum computing could be an effective means to handle big sets of data, for example in running the Grover search algorithm, which was designed to search big sets of data for specific information. “Roughly speaking, if a classical computer needed a million steps to find the answer, as there were a million separate pieces of data, then the quantum computer would only need a thousand steps,” outlines Dr Möttönen. For Dr Möttönen and his colleagues the immediate priority is to get the single-photon detector working properly, which could lead on to further development. “Resistor elements similar to those that we use in the detector could be used to actually engineer, or control, the environment of superconducting qubits,” he says.

At a glance Full Project Title Single-Photon Microwave Devices: era of quantum optics outside cavities (SINGLEOUT) Project Objectives The most revolutionizing aim of this proposal is to build a single-photon detector for microwaves in metallic waveguides. It is an ultimately sensitive device for microwaves which has an immediate demand in low-temperature electronics. Just by itself, it constitutes a great advancement in the toolbox of physicists and engineers opening new horizons to study, for example, the particle–wave dualism of free microwave photons. Contact Details Project Coordinator, Mikko Möttönen POB 13500 00076 AALTO, Finland T: +358 50 5940950 E: mikko.mottonen@aalto.fi W: http://physics.aalto.fi/qcd/ P. J. Jones, J. A. M. Huhtamäki, K. Y. Tan, and M. Möttönen, Single-photon heat conduction in electrical circuits, Phys. Rev. B 85, 075413 (2012). P. Jones, J. A. M. Huhtamäki, J. Salmilehto, K. Y. Tan, and M. Möttönen, Tunable electromagnetic environment for superconducting quantum bits, Sci. Rep. 3, 1987 (2013).

Dr Mikko Möttönen

Project Coordinator

Dr Mikko Möttönen is the director of Quantum Computing and Devices Laboratories at Aalto University. He obtained his MSc in 2002 and PhD in 2005 from Helsinki University of Technology and spent postdoctoral research periods at University of California, Berkeley and University of New South Wales. He is an expert in several fields of quantum physics such as quantum information processing, quantum nanoelectronics, and BoseEinstein condensates.

New strategies are foreseen to reduce fat (saturated and trans-fatty acids), salt (sodium) and sugar (mono- and disaccharides) in food products. We spoke to Bianca Pop, dissemination manager of the PLEASURE project about their unique new approach to address this challenge from the processing side instead of using subsitutes or replacers

When less means more - “reduced-in” food PLEASURE is a research project aiming

at finding solutions to today’s excessive consumption of salt, sugar and saturated fats, by designing different products that have a lower content of these components. PLEASURE approach is unique, as it is the first attempt of reducing salt, sugar and fat content in food products, from the processing side, by developing innovative processes that will work by optimising the sensorial perception. The research will lead to novel technologies for the production of several products: pizza and puffing pastry dough, mozzarella-style cheese, Bologna type sausage, cooked ham and dried cured sausage and fruit/vegetables preparations. In the second step, the concepts used for the mono-food systems will be incorporated into three Ready-to-Eat (RTE) meals: a pizza system, a puffing

pastry with a meat filling and a puffing pastry with a sweet fruit filling. The technology brings along the possibility to achieve a different dispersion of salt and fat in the food layers, leading to a reduction in the unwanted lipids, salt and sugar (mono- and disaccharides). A focus on the sensorial perception of the sugars, fats and salts is planned, as consumer acceptance is fundamental. For the salt reduction, a combined approach that includes both replacers and methods that feature the enhancement of the saltiness perception are used. A reduction of 30 % of the salt content for cooked sausage Bologna style and cooked

PLEASURE (Novel Processing approaches for the development of food products Low in fAt, Salt and sUgar) The PLEASURE project aims at developing innovative processes and/or implementing novel technologies to allow the development and production of food products with low content of fat (saturated and trans-fatty acids), as well as salt and sugar. Dipl. Ing. Bianca Pop Pleasure Dissemination Manager SC TRITECC SRL, Cosminului Str.8, 400642 ClujNapoca, Romania T: +40 364 80 14 58 E: bpop@tritecc.ro W: www.tritecc.ro BIANCA POP, senior project manager, has an engineering degree and vast experience in food quality and safety issues. Ms. Pop has several years of professional experience in managing European projects, being currently responsible as dissemination and communication manager for various FP7 Funded Collaborative Projects.

Above: Masticator Below: Cutting Process

ham has been developed by using HPP treatment and / or the use of phosphates. Similar progress has been obtained with pizza dough by implementing salty micro domains in the dough to enhance saltiness perception while reducing the overall salt content. Fibres, natural ferments and enzymes are used for the substitution of fats, with the aim of redesigning the microstructures of the products to optimise taste and other properties. The total saturated fat content will be reduced by replacing fats with vegetable oils. A mozzarella-style cheese both for direct consumption and for use in pizza products with a low content of sodium and fat will be designed. High pressure homogenisation and enzyme technologies are used to modulate taste and texture and to enhance the flavour intensity. In addition to a successful screening and optimization procedure, novel process equipment had been developed and adapted to high viscous products like fruit purees or tomato paste. Within the process developed, the whole sucrose and glucose present in the fruit preparations had successfully been removed. PLEASURE is an ambitious project that will have a major impact on developing and manufacturing of traditional and processed food from different European countries. PLEASURE outcomes intend to bring about the scientific bricks which will permit to develop optimized strategies of salt, sugar and lipids reduction in particular in the case of assembled solid foods, namely RTE meals. The results described above and more will be shared to academia and industry in an international conference that will be held in association with the Health and Food Days (JAS - Journées Aliments & Santé) in La Rochelle, France during 18-19 June 2014. Coffee breaks and lunch break will be used as opportunities to taste and compare different products based on process approach for salt-sugar and lipid reduction concepts. For more information please visit: http://www.pleasure-fp7.com/

EU Research

Research group rethinks sustainability Many of us work in air-conditioned offices, drive to supermarkets to buy our food and then store it in freezers, without thinking whether these practices could be organised in a more sustainable way. Professor Dale Southerton of the ESRC, Defra and Scottish Government funded Sustainable Practices Research Group tells us about their research into how social practices emerge and how they can be changed. Over the last century numerous innovations have made everyday life more comfortable and convenient, and along with those innovations novel social practices have evolved. Many of us work in air-conditioned offices, drive to supermarkets to buy our food and then store it in freezers, without thinking whether these practices could be organised in a more sustainable way. That’s an issue which lies at the core of the Sustainable Practices Research Group’s (SPRG) agenda. “Our main objectives are to understand how certain kinds of practices emerge, how they’re reproduced, and how they may change or disappear,” outlines Professor Dale Southerton, Director of the SPRG at the University of Manchester. The group is comprised of seven projects, all pursuing research into the issues around sustainability and sustainable consumption. The projects address diverse issues, such as why indoor temperatures are converging on 22°C worldwide, how eating habits change and understandings of Zero Carbon Housing. But they share a theoretical approach. “We’re highly critical of the dominant ways of thinking around consumption that you currently find in public policy,” continues Professor Southerton. “So, at the moment, in policy terms, consumption is usually thought about as ‘consumer behaviour’ – individuals making decisions to buy something. So, to change consumer behaviour, you either adjust the price of goods, or you give consumers information to inform those purchasing choices. Alternatively you address the impact of consumption through technological innovation.” www.euresearcher.com

Using Resources Professor Southerton says a new approach is needed to improve sustainability. “A social practices approach addresses the problem not in terms of individual behaviour, or technological innovation alone, but in terms of the shared social practices through which people use resources, such as doing the laundry, cooking or driving. The first point is that you have to focus on how things are used. The second is that you have to understand

how needs and wants emerge. For example, it’s not about trying to get people to choose to have a shower instead of a bath, it’s more about trying to understand how showering becomes a normal, everyday practice,” he stresses. One model used by Professor Southerton and his colleagues suggests social practices are organised or coordinated through three factors, or elements. “One is cultural understanding and expectations – so what people expect from a social practice – such as comfort,

cleanliness or convenience. And those standards change over time,” he says. “The second is the kind of material resources that are available to people, things like freezers, fridges and also infrastructures like roads and out of town shopping centres. The third element is competence and know-how – this includes skills, like driving, but also cultural competence like knowing what’s ‘a proper meal’.” The material resources available to people have changed significantly over the recent past, which has had a corresponding impact on everyday life. To take just one example, something like 3 per cent of UK households in 1969 had a freezer, which had grown to 97 per cent by 1980, leading to changes in eating patterns. “The freezer was first marketed to store seasonal gluts of home produce. But with more people having freezers a frozen food industry developed, which began to change the way we shopped, cooked and ate. About a third of supermarket space is now devoted to frozen food. That undermines the need to have local shops, butchers and so on,” explains Professor Southerton. This has led to freezers becoming ever more essential to everyday life. “You could say that people have a choice, but the infrastructure providing our food has made the practice of cooking from frozen food easy and pushed out other practices of shopping, storing food and cooking. And the freezer is one of the most resourceintensive devices in our homes,” continues Professor Southerton. “So the point here is that the material infrastructures around freezers have developed in such a way that it’s locked the whole population into particular practices of eating.”

buildings, so air conditioning came on at 28º and not 24º. Then they relaxed the dress code. Japan had very formal dress codes – they had to make it ok not to work in a traditional business suit, or people would simply get too hot. So a social marketing campaign was aimed at changing the cultural norms within the workplace, to make it acceptable for people to wear short sleeves and no jackets, for instance.” In 2006, Cool Biz resulted in an estimated 1.14 million ton reduction in CO2 emissions, equivalent to the annual emissions associated with the average energy use of 85,000 US homes. The SPRG’s ‘Keeping Cool’ project has explored similar themes. The project has investigated the processes through which air conditioning has increasingly come to be a normal expectation in a variety of indoor environments in the UK, including hospitals, offices and hotels, by analysing practices such as nursing, IT design, office work and hospitality management. “We’ve found the ‘need’ for air conditioning in many cases was not to keep people cool, but rather to keep office and hospital technologies cool,” says Professor Southerton. “So a standardised indoor temperature is being engineered into our built environment and, in doing so, is coming to shape a wide range of social practices as increasingly energyintensive”. The group’s research focuses primarily on resources and resource intensity, but issues like economic sustainability and cultural context are also important considerations. The SPRG project on Drinking Water looked at how water drinking practices have come to take on their particular form in different cultural contexts. “If you contrast India with the UK, the provision of bottled water should be a right in India not a luxury, because in some places they haven’t got a reliable supply of clean tap water,” points out Professor Southerton.

One SPRG project has investigated different understandings of zero carbon living. The aim here is not to make a judgment on frozen food, but to analyse it as part of social practices – driving, shopping, cooking – rather than as part of individual behaviour and choices. The policy interventions that have been most successful in changing established social practices are those which simultaneously addressed material infrastructures, cultural understandings and the conventions or rules that guide how

practices are performed; Professor Southerton points to Japan’s Cool Biz campaign as an example. “In 2005 the Japanese government set about reducing the amount of energy used by air conditioning,” he outlines. Cool Biz addressed a range of issues, rather than just individual behaviour; Professor Southerton points to three key elements of the campaign. “They changed the setting of the thermostats in their government

Wider impact The SPRG wrote a report for the Scottish government, in which they reviewed behaviour change initiatives across the world, and Professor Southerton says it is having an impact on policy. “The Scottish government took the ideas from the report and have created a toolkit for policy staff to follow when developing initiatives,” he says. There has also been interest in the group’s research from the commercial sector; however, Professor Southerton

EU Research

says their ideas require collaboration between governments and businesses to really change behaviour. “We’re talking about how you would shift a whole range of practices that are connected together, how would you shift ways of life? You can’t do that in a piecemeal fashion, by a nice, simple campaign around charging 5p for a carrier bag. There’s a problem about the scales at which policy operates.”

discussion, with distinguished speakers in the field of policy and sustainability, including Lord Gus O’Donnell, the former Cabinet Secretary and head of the Civil Service. The SPRG Exhibition showcased individual project research findings and integrated programme insights through poster displays, a short film, video presentation, audio installation and interactive exhibits. The SPRG plans

We’re talking about how you would shift a whole range of practices that are connected together, how would you shift ways of life? You can’t do that in a piecemeal fashion “We’ve just released another SPRG report – Interventions in Practice - which takes quite a lot of these arguments about how we need to re-frame the kinds of questions that policy-makers ask, so we can find the right kind of evidence to deal more systematically with changes in our way of life,” says Professor Southerton. The SPRG is working to bring their findings to wider attention, through both research papers and events with government and commercial partners. “We’ve set out to engage with people in non-traditional academic ways,” explains Professor Southerton. The SPRG’s finale event in London in September 2013 brought together an invited audience of over a hundred policy makers, academics, business people and NGOs. The event combined an exhibition and a panel

further events with Unilever and the Scottish Government. “The SPRG hasn’t attempted to find universal answers to the problems it addresses or produce a single model of change towards sustainability,” says Professor Southerton. “Rather we’ve identified the context-specific processes that result in resource-intensive patterns of everyday consumption. For example, the ‘Keeping Cool’ and ‘Zero Carbon Living’ projects explore processes of standardisation in different contexts. More generally, our research shows that a practice perspective helps dissect the complexity of everyday life by providing insights into the ways in which practices are connected. It is these connections that offer the greatest potential for transition to more sustainable ways of living.”

At a glance Full Project Title Sustainable Practices Research Group (SPRG) Project Objectives The SPRG is a major, three year (2010-13) research collaboration across eight UK universities, bringing together leading social scientists in the field of sustainable consumption in seven projects. It seeks to understand the dynamics of social practices, cultural conventions, institutional processes and infrastructures in order to inform transitions towards more sustainable ways of life. The SPRG report ‘Interventions in Practice: Re-framing Policy Approaches to Consumer Behaviour’ and other publications are available from www.sprg.ac.uk. Project Funding The three year programme is funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Department of the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs, and the Scottish Government. Contact Details Katrina Farrugia PA to Professor Southerton Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) The University of Manchester 188 Waterloo Place, Oxford Road Manchester, United Kingdom M13 9PL T: +0161 275 0189 E: katrina.farrugia@manchester.ac.uk W: www.sprg.ac.uk

Professor Dale Southerton

Changing habits is a big issue for sustainability. The SPRG investigated how eating habits are formed and changed.

Project Director

Professor Southerton is Director of the SPRG, he is also Director of the Sustainable Consumption Institute, SCI Professorial Research Fellow and Professor of Sociology at The University of Manchester. He has published extensively in the fields of consumption/consumer culture, time use, material culture and sustainability.

www.euresearcher.com

EU Research

For more information, please visit: www.euresearcher.com