HORIZON BLOG: European R&D policy newsbytes (Archived_02)

The Central European Research Infrastructure Consortium (CERIC) has added new labs and instruments to its open access offer for fuel cells research.

As of the next round of calls for proposals, researchers can apply for access to the Hydrogen Technology Center (HTC) facilities, located at Charles University in Prague.

More details here.

The European Commission has launched a call for high-level experts to join a board for a proposed Horizon Europe mission on the New European Bauhaus.

The deadline for submitting applications is 29 August 2023.

Switzerland's state secretary for education, research and innovation last week met her EU counterparts in Santander, Spain, at least in part to discuss the future direction of Horizon Europe, the EU's research and innovation programme from which Bern is currently excluded. 

Martina Hirayama held talks "focused on European science diplomacy and the further strategic planning of Horizon Europe", according to a statement from the Swiss government. 

"The focus of the discussion was to assess and promote coherence between Horizon Europe’s overall objectives and their implementation in both the Horizon Europe Strategic Plan 2025–2027 and in future framework programmes," according to the statement. She also held bilateral talks with research ministers from Germany, Romania, Austria, Estonia and Spain. 

Bern remains locked out of the programme after wider talks about its relationship with the EU collapsed in 2021. But the Swiss still hope to join the framework programme, and have put national guarantee schemes in place to compensate for being locked out. 

The Innovative Health Initiative (IHI), the research partnership between EU and Europe’s health industry has launched two new calls for proposals featuring topics on the environmental impacts of healthcare, the use of animals in research, and the generation of synthetic health data for research.

The calls are worth €200 million and are funded from the Horizon Europe budget. Industry partners will commit an equivalent amount to the projects, mainly though in-kind contributions, such as their researchers’ time and access to resources and equipment.

IHI’s interim Executive Director, Dr Hugh Laverty, said: “The topics in these calls show how IHI makes concrete contributions to key European policies. Our two topics on the environmental impacts of healthcare are in line with the goals of the European Green Deal. We have topics that advance the EU’s aim of replacing, reducing and refining the use of animals in research. We also have a topic that will help to boost the involvement of people from underserved patient populations in clinical trials.”

The European Commission has released two videos on how grantees and applicants can manage lump sums and better understand this new way of allocating Horizon Europe money.

Lump sums are advertised as a bureaucracy-free alternative to traditional real cost reporting, which involves having to file timesheets and report on each item of spending. The Commission has been pushing for a roll out since 2018 to reduce bureaucratic overheads and cut high error rates in EU spending on research.

The roll out hasn't been easy with many criticising the original lump sum pilot based on which the Commission is now introducing more and more lump sum funding in Horizon Europe.

The European Commission has set out the tools and examples from around Europe that enable innovators to test out their ideas in different regulatory contexts in a new staff working document.  

Such tools include regulatory sandboxes, test beds and living labs that allow innovators to figure our how their innovations could work in the real world.  

The document, focused on energy, is part of the Commission’s push to deliver on the New European Innovation Agenda, an EU plan to boost its deep tech innovation landscape adopted last summer. The plan’s other regulation-related measures include a revised state aid framework for research and development, new experimentation facilities for AI innovation and anadvisory group focused on virtual worlds.  

A group of AI stakeholders will release the first version of shared protocols for the safe and responsible development of large-scale AI models in October.

The first version of the protocols, developed by stakeholders from organisations such as ACLU, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, IBM, Meta, and Omidyar Network, will be put forward for public consultation.

The goal is to give AI model providers the tools to ensure their models are safe and help them use AI to pursue societal benefits. The Partnership on AI brings together academic, industry, civil society and media to set guidance for a responsible AI future.

The European Commission’s draft regulation on new genomic techniques in plant breeding and agriculture will help to make agriculture in Europe more sustainable, according to a joint statement by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

“The new regulation will facilitate access to field trials on plants developed with these new technologies, thereby paving the way to more diverse crops with a smaller ecological footprint,” said DFG president Katja Becker.

“The way we farm will help determine the success of our efforts to address the climate and biodiversity crises,” said Leopoldina president Gerald Haug. “New breeding techniques can play an important role in the transformation of agriculture,” he said.

The European Commission has put forward a plan aimed at phasing out animal testing, including the use of animals in research, after a citizen-led initiative mounted another campaign against the widespread practice.

The Commission is to launch a new roadmap for legislative and non-legislative actions that would further reduce animal testing, with the aim of coming up with alternatives. According to the new plan, the Commission will also allocate “appropriate” funding for projects that focus on finding alternative testing methods.

The Council has today approved EU’s new regulation on semiconductors, the Chips Act. This is the last step in the decision-making procedure.

“With the Chips Act, Europe will be a frontrunner in the world semiconductors race,” said Héctor Gómez Hernández, Spanish minister for industry, trade and tourism. “In the long run, this will also contribute to the renaissance of our industry and the reduction of our foreign dependencies,” he said.