OCT Horizon Europe – EIC Pathfinder Challenges 2022 With its Pathfinder programme the EIC supports the exploration of bold ideas for radically new technologies. It welcomes the high-risk / high gain and interdisciplinary cutting-edge science collaborations that underpin technological breakthroughs. Pathfinder goes beyond what is already known. Visionary thinking can open up promising avenues towards powerful new technologies. HORIZON-EIC-2022-PATHFINDERCHALLENGES-01-03: Cardiogenomics holds the potential to address existing gaps in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases (CVD), which would enable better outcome for the patient. Advanced genetic testing taking into account complex inheritance, or combining genetic testing, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics analysis with clinical phenotype can improve clinical management of the CVD and identify more accurately, who is likely to be at risk for major cardiovascular events such as heart failure or sudden death. Many gene variants associated with CVD are of unknown significance and thus of limited clinical utility. Our ability to sub-classify CVD diseases according to their underlying molecular mechanism has been enhanced due to technological approaches such as, spatial or single-cell transcriptomics, and others. HORIZON-EIC-2022-PATHFINDERCHALLENGES-01-04: Towards the Healthcare Continuum: technologies to support a radical shift from episodic to continuous healthcare. Today, episodic (symptom-triggered) healthcare remains the norm. To a large extent, individuals are entrusted with the responsibility to self-monitor and trigger requests to the health system upon identification of relevant symptoms. In spite of the growing number of screening programmes, the diagnosis of a vast majority of disorders, including those in which early action has a direct impact on morbidity or survival, still relies heavily on the individual to initiate the process. Further, a substantial fraction of outpatients manage the post-treatment phase, particularly of non-life threatening conditions, with qualitative self-monitoring, seeking help only upon perceived evidence of disease recurrence. In essence the current approach to healthcare is mostly reactive. HORIZON-EIC-2022-PATHFINDERCHALLENGES-01-05: EIC Pathfinder Challenge: DNA-based digital data storage. Current technologies for digital data storage are hitting sustainability limits in terms of energy consumption and their use of rare and toxic materials. Moreover, data integrity when using those technologies is limited in time, which complicates archival data-storage. DNA or certain classes of synthetic DNA alternatives provide an alternative that promises information densities that are several orders of magnitude higher than classical memories, and stability for millennia rather than years. Moreover, DNA-based data storage can profit from the growing range of DNA research, tools and techniques from the life sciences, while potentially also adding to it (e.g., for in-vivo data collection). Deadline date: 19 October 2022 17:00:00 Brussels time. |