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The EU Research team take a look at current events in the scientific news
EU launches regional innovation support policy framework Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth announced the first 63 regions, seven cities and four countries. The launch of this pilot project aims to help regions coordinate regional, national and EU research and innovation policies, and to bridge the many gaps in Europe’s fragmented innovation ecosystems. “We would like to address two types of fragmentation in the European innovation ecosystems,” said Mariya Gabriel, EU research commissioner. “[These are the] fragmentation of funding instruments and policies within territories, and lack of connection between regional innovation players.” The new scheme, Partnerships for Regional Innovation, is part of the upcoming European Innovation Agenda (EIA), the European Commission’s new plan to promote innovation, due to be announced in early July. “It’s our wish to have these partnerships as one of the flagship initiatives of the new EIA,” said Gabriel.
The partnerships build on the Commission’s Smart Specialisation Platform, which aims to help regions develop a strategic approach to using EU cohesion funds. While that is seen as being effective, the new pilot goes a step further by setting out a methodology for navigating the various EU and national instruments as well, including the Horizon Europe research programme, and helping regions to deploy them. The one year pilot partnerships will help raise funds, but each region will cover its own participation costs, with activities tailored for each participant, including workshops, exchange of good practice, and in depth policy reviews.
The participants, 63 regions, seven cities and four countries, will share good practices, develop and test tools to leverage various funding and policy resources, and link regional and national programmes to EU initiatives. All this will be done with a focus on sustainability, tying the EU’s green policy to local innovation actions. Elisa Ferreira, EU commissioner for cohesion, hopes the partnerships will help regions tackle some of the asymmetric impacts of horizontal policies, and of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine. “If we don’t have a policy that rebalances this split, we won’t be able to have convergent growth,” said Ferreira.
In a position paper published in May, the German Research Foundation (DFG) says it is against a top down reform of the research assessment system in Europe, two weeks after an alliance of ten German research organisations, including the DFG, have warned they will not sign a draft agreement prepared jointly by EU member states, stakeholders and the Commission if the proposed reforms turn out to be binding. “The DFG is committed to an open publishing system and a culture of assessment that is geared towards content,” said DFG president Katja Becker in a statement announcing the publication of the position paper. The DFG says a change in the evaluation culture of research institutions is needed, but a reform cannot be successful if research managers do not fully trust the new system, which would discard publication metrics. “We want to promote confidence in this change so as to make it easier for academics to put quality first when it comes to the publication and assessment of scholarship,” said Becker. The Commission and a number of research associations across Europe say the current system of evaluating research is becoming outdated and reform is needed to make it more efficient. Instead of rewarding researchers for the number of papers published, citations and the prestige of the journals concerned, a new system should look at the quality of research, while reducing the reliance on journal metrics. These concerns are not new, nor limited to the EU.
In 2013, an international coalition signed the DORA declaration on research assessment in San Francisco, hoping to reduce the weight of publication metrics in the evaluation of researchers. The Commission has included a reform of research assessment in the policy agenda of the revived European Research Area plan for a single market for research in the EU. The Commission is now gathering support from a coalition of organisations to implement the assessment reform and to begin testing it out this year. The DFG acknowledges that assessing research by leaning heavily on publication metrics can have a negative impact on science and the humanities. Metrics such as the total number of publications and citations, as well as bibliometric measures such as the h-index, a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author’s scholarly output and performance, are increasingly problematic. Researchers can exploit the system and advance their careers by chasing to score higher points in the publication game instead of focusing on the content of the research. DFG recommends that research organisations and funding agencies come up with new ways to assess the quality of publications. According to its position paper, it is the responsibility of funding agencies and foundations to accept a broader range of publication. “The reputation of publication venues and bibliometric indicators, where they exist, should be removed from the canon of official assessment criteria and kept to a minimum in practical use.”
The EU has confirmed it is holding back the UK’s access to the €95bn ‘Horizon Europe’ programme as a response to Boris Johnson’s plans to tear up the Northern Ireland protocol.
João Vale de Almeida, EU ambassador to the UK, said British scientists would become “collateral damage” in the dispute with the country’s place in Horizon increasingly at risk of falling “victim of the political impasse”. He added: “It’s very regrettable.” The UK’s associate membership of Horizon was foreseen in the 2020 Brexit agreement but has been delayed by long-running disagreements between London and the bloc over Northern Ireland. The UK is preparing legislation that would clear the way for it to ditch parts of the protocol, which governs trade between the region and mainland Britain. The stand-off has alarmed the UK’s university leaders, who have written to British prime minister Boris Johnson pleading with him “to make a personal intervention to break the deadlock” before it is too late.
To get the partnerships up and running, the Commission’s science hub, the Joint Research Centre, has drawn up a list of the more than 100 tools that are available to strengthen the coordination of regional, national and EU innovation policies. At the centre of the toolbox are local missions that coordinate actions, making it possible for regions to take advantage of different combinations of innovation policies and funding.
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The Commission wants research institutions to reduce their dependence on journal metrics instead rewarding researchers for the quality of their work, not by the number of citations.
EU blocks UK researchers from Horizon Europe funding amid Brexit tensions
Closing this gap will also be at the centre stage of the new EIA, which aims to make Europe a powerhouse for deep tech start-ups and create a pan-European innovation ecosystem where innovators can seamlessly work together and expand business operations across borders. “These partnerships will make certain that this new wave of innovation spreads throughout Europe,” said Gabriel.
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DFG raises concerns as the EU looks to reform research publishing
The European Research Council (ERC) has written to 98 scientists and academics who were recently approved for €172m (£145m) in grants telling them that if the UK’s associate membership of the €80bn Horizon Europe programme is not ratified they will not be eligible to draw down the money. Scientists have said they are now
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scrambling to find alternative EU institutions to host the funding, with some already turning down the ERC money and hoping the UK government’s promise of replacement cash will be delivered. Cambridge University astrophysicist Dr Nicholas Walton had to leave his coordinating role in an upcoming European Space Agency project, as he was told UK scientists cannot hold leadership roles until the country’s Horizon Europe membership is ratified. Other UK scientists are facing dilemmas over whether to move to the EU or hand over leadership of projects to an EU institution, the Guardian reported. The European Commission faced pressure last November when a joint statement was issued by more than 1,000 universities, 56 academies of science and 33 rectors’ associations, urging it to finalise the UK’s association to Horizon Europe or risk “endangering current and future plans for collaboration”. In December, the Royal Irish Academy also urged Ireland’s Government to help finalise the UK’s involvement with Horizon Europe, saying the ongoing delays are putting research partnerships in jeopardy.
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President Zelensky urges universities to help rebuild Ukraine’s higher education system
Research shows climate change is stealing people’s sleep
He spoke of situation in Ukraine for students and universities and endorses partnerships with American higher education. President Zelensky, met virtually last week with presidents of members of the Association of American Universities. He gave an overview of Ukraine’s position on the war instigated by Russia and also answered questions about Ukraine’s interest in future partnerships with American colleges and universities. The address was also livestreamed to students at AAU institutions. Zelensky dedicated his talk to the students who were watching. He said all students face some key decisions: “Are you an actor or just an observer? Do you try to change anything or not?” These are life-changing decisions that shape students’ character, he said. He spoke of how when students encounter hate, they will film incidents on their phones and post the video to Instagram or YouTube. But to really change hate, in some circumstances, he asks whether the students who recorded the hate actually stopped a hateful act from taking place. Earlier this year, Ukrainian universities were planning a return to on-campus teaching and research after two years of COVID-19 enforced virtual operations. But the Russian invasion has now propelled the higher education system into a much bigger crisis. University buildings, including libraries and research centres have been destroyed by Russian bombs and now the government is looking for help abroad, not only for the money to pay for new buildings, but also for experts who can help the education ministry to reform university curricula once the war is over. “This is not just about money, this is about expertise,” Zelensky told a videoconference with representatives of the Association of American Universities (AAU) on Monday, the 82nd day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
American university heads attending the meeting offered help immediately. “Count on us,” replied Kristina Johnson, president of Ohio State University. Barbara Snyder, president of the AAU said, “President Zelensky rightly understands that one of the best ways to guarantee a better, stronger, more prosperous Ukraine is rebuild its higher education system around world class research universities. Strong research universities not only educate a nation’s populace, they contribute immeasurably to innovation, health care, economic growth and cultural vibrancy, and they help retain domestic talent,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education said universities stand ready to offer help beyond the immediate relief that is being offered to scholars. “We want to work with you to make sure that [fleeing academics] all feel that they are a part of the renaissance of Ukraine when they return,” said Mitchell. When the war cools off, Zelensky said, Ukrainian universities would welcome experts from the US and use their advice on how to build stronger university departments that would produce the knowhow needed to fend off future cyber attacks from Russia. Ukraine also needs to train future professionals who could contribute to the defence, aeronautics and healthcare sectors. “Life is coming back in Kyiv,” said Zelensky. Faculty and staff are slowly returning to campuses. For safety reasons students are still attending online classes, but everyone is, “sick of this idleness,” But it is still unclear how this aid would be delivered and what the US university sector, which is largely private, could do to help in the long term.
It’s likely to get worse as the planet gets hotter with 50-58 hours of sleep per person being ‘eroded’ every year by 2099. The research, published in the journal One Earth, finds that warm night times steal an average of about 44 hours of sleep per person each year. And they cause the average person to suffer from around 11 nights of inadequate sleep, that’s less than seven hours in a night, each year. The researchers gathered billions of individual sleep measurements collected from more than 47,000 participants across 68 countries around the world. They then paired these observations with weather and climate data from the locations where they were gathered. It’s one of the largest studies of its kind to examine the links between climate change and sleep. “Our results indicate that sleep – an essential restorative process integral for human health and productivity – may be degraded by warmer temperatures,” Kelton Minor, first author of the study and PhD candidate from the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement. “In order to make informed climate policy decisions moving forward, we need to better account for the full spectrum of plausible future climate impacts extending from today’s societal greenhouse gas emissions choices,” he said. While previous studies have clearly shown hot days increase deaths and hospitalisations
and worsen human performance, researchers said biological and behavioural mechanisms underlying these impacts have not been well understood. The study relies on data from people who have access to sleeptracking wristbands. The majority of the data comes from higherincome countries and tends to skew toward middle-aged men. It’s likely that more data from other demographics, particularly lower-income participants, would indicate an even bigger effect. In particular, the study underrepresents participants from Africa, Central and South America, and the Middle East — places the authors note “already rank among the warmest in the world.” So while the study outlines yet another clear climate-related problem for human health, there’s still more work to be done. Future research, the authors suggest, should focus on the world’s most vulnerable populations. “The burden of future warming will not be evenly distributed,” the researchers said. “Taken together, our results demonstrate that temperature-driven sleep loss likely has and may continue to exacerbate global environmental inequalities.”
PRACE 24th Call for proposals supports high-gain scientific research and industrial innovations Half the applicants were successful and were awarded over 2 billion core hours of access to world class computing and data management resources. The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. They were first featured in the EU Research publication in our Autumn 2021 edition. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are made available by 5 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, ETH Zurich/ CSCS representing Switzerland, GCS representing Germany and GENCI/CEA representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme. The 24th Call for Proposals for PRACE Project Access received 62 eligible proposals, of which 31 were awarded, a total of 2.136 billion core hours. This brings the total number of Project Access projects
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awarded to 947 since 2010. Taking into account the four multi-year proposals from calls 20 and 22, and the 10.21 million core hours reserved for Centres of Excellence, the total amount of computing time awarded by PRACE to date has reached approximately 35 billion core hours. The proposals awarded under the 24th Call are led by principal investigators from 13 different countries including international collaborations with team members from countries like the USA and China. Among the awarded proposals, seven scientific domains are represented: 10 proposals are linked to the fields of Chemical Sciences and Materials, 8 to Fundamental Constituents of Matter, 3 to Engineering, 3 to Earth System Sciences, 3 to Universe Sciences, 2 to Biochemistry, Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, and 2 to Mathematics and Computer Sciences. Two projects are awarded under the “Industry Access Track”, which earmarks 10% of the total resources for proposals with principal investigators from industry.
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The genetic landscape of Europe New study gives ‘big picture’ of European population genetics. A new study by RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences examining population genetics across Europe has analyzed the diverse ancestries of people living in the UK. This knowledge has the potential to inform future health research on genetic factors leading to disease. The study, led by researchers at the RCSI School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences and the SFI FutureNeuro Research Centre, has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The RCSI and FutureNeuro researchers used the UK Biobank, a database of genetic and health information of over 500,000 participants from the UK, to examine population genetics and ancestry across Europe. The study analyzed the genetic ancestry data of individuals in the UK Biobank who reported having a European birthplace outside of the UK – about 1% of the dataset. Researchers cataloged where individuals shared segments of their genome with other individuals, meaning they had a common ancestor within the past 3,000 years. With this information, the researchers could group individuals with more segments in common than on average into three branches, corresponding to southern, central-eastern, and northwestern Europe.
Pfizer boss warns against Covid-19 complacency as cases rise
By studying the patterns of the genome sharing, the researchers were able to infer historical patterns such as population size and how genetically isolated specific European regions are, relative to
each other. In general, people from southern Europe were found to have less in common genetically with each other than in other areas, due to the larger population sizes and therefore usually greater number of ancestors in the region. An exception to this was Malta which, being an island, was found to have a smaller pool of ancestors. This is the first large sample analysis of Maltese population genetics. Identifying European regions such as Malta with specific histories of genetic isolation could potentially aid the discovery of genetic factors contributing to disease. Professor Gianpiero Cavalleri, Professor of Human Genetics at RCSI, Deputy Director of FutureNeuro and senior author on the paper, commented: “This research has shown the diversity of European ancestries sampled by the UK Biobank and has enabled us show the “big picture” of the genetic landscape of Europe, including new insights into communities such as within Malta. This work suggests similar gains of knowledge could be found within non-European ancestry groups using the UK Biobank, groups that are typically excluded from genetic analyses.” The research was conducted using the publicly available UK Biobank resource. It was supported by the NUI Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Sciences and Engineering and Science Foundation Ireland, via the FutureNeuro Research Centre and the Centre for Research Training in Genomics Data Science.
Albert Bourla, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Pfizer predicts constant waves of COVID-19 because of complacency about the coronavirus and politicization of the pandemic. Albert Bourla pointed to complacency about the virus, politicization of the pandemic, and diminishing immunity from vaccines and prior infections, according to comments reported by the Financial Times. People are also growing “tired” of COVID-19 safety regulations, said Bourla, who was speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where world leaders and members of the business elite are gathered for an annual summit. Though COVID-19 cases are falling globally, in the US they’ve been gradually rising since early April, data from Johns Hopkins University shows. In the week to May 22, the US reported 790,000 new cases, more than three times as many as were reported in the last week of March. Pfizer said on May 3 it expects 2022 revenue from Comirnaty, its COVID-19 vaccine, of around $32 billion. “What worries me is the complacency,” Bourla said in Davos, noting that fewer people were wearing masks and that even people who have already been vaccinated were less likely to get booster shots. The consequences would likely be seen in between three and six months, he predicted. Bourla said Pfizer believed that antiviral drugs would replace vaccines as the key weapon in fighting the coronavirus, at least until shots providing a longer period of immunity were developed. Pfizer was “doubling down” on producing its antiviral pill Paxlovid, Bourla added. On Pfizer’s “game changer” antiviral pill, Paxlovid, the head of Pfizer healthcare Ireland Peter Reid said it was up to the Health Service Executive to recommend who should benefit from the treatment. It emerged last week that 65 doses of Paxlovid had been administered in Ireland since the drug became available here last month.
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The Irish government bought 5,000 doses of the pill which have been used to treat older, unvaccinated, high-risk and immunocompromised patients. “We’ve signed a bilateral agreement with the State, so that’s great. That means we’ve been able to make that treatment available to patients who may benefit from it,” he said. “We have the licence, but it is up to the HSE and the Therapeutic Advisory Group to recommend who should benefit from the treatment.” Vaccine manufacturers are under pressure to share vaccine technology to allow for the manufacture of generic vaccines that could potentially be made and manufactured in developing countries. However Mr Reid said supply is not the issue as Pfizer is “making the vaccine available in an equitable and affordable way across the globe”. Vaccine donations to developing countries is also impacted by infrastructural challenges. “A lot of it is down to their infrastructure to take in a vaccine. As you know, it’s refrigerated at very low temperatures. So do they have the infrastructure to take it in? Do they have the trained resources to administer the vaccine? And then there is also the culture in some countries where the uptake of vaccines has never been high and therefore it is going to be a challenge.” Ireland has committed five million doses, mostly through the WHO-backed Covax initiative, which is co-ordinating the supply of vaccines to less developed states. But only 1.8 million have been delivered. The Department of Health said vaccine donation activity has reduced substantially this year, and while millions of doses have been put forward by Ireland for donation, there is “a significant emerging supply and demand imbalance.”
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Gene edited tomatoes could help people ‘ketchup’ on the Vitamin D Tomatoes that boost the body’s vitamin D could be among the first gene-edited crops allowed on sale in England. Researchers at the John Innes Centre (JIC) said the breakthrough offers a “sustainable solution” to a global health problem - as millions of people are estimated to be deficient in vitamin D, needed for healthy bones and muscles. It is also know as the “sunshine vitamin” as it is produced in the human body from sunlight absorbed by the skin. But in winter, and in higher latitudes, many people need extra vitamin D from supplements or from a small number of foods including oily fish, red meat and egg yolks.Plants are generally poor sources, and while tomato leaves naturally contain very low levels of one of the building blocks of vitamin D, called provitamin D3, it is not normally found in ripe tomatoes.
high levels of provitamin D3, so these usually-wasted parts of the plant could be used for the manufacture of vegan-friendly vitamin D3 supplements or food fortification.
The researchers used new “gene editing” techniques to “switch off” a particular plant enzyme to allow provitamin D3 to accumulate in the fruit. This was then converted to vitamin D3 through exposure to ultraviolet (UVB) light. The JIC team said one edited tomato contained the same levels of vitamin D as two medium-sized eggs or 28g of tuna. The study, published in the Nature Plants journal, says the leaves also contained much higher
Gene editing is different to the controversial process of genetic modification (GM), as scientists can target and manipulate specific genes already present in an organism, rather than introducing DNA from different species. Later this week, the government is expected to introduce a bill aiming to speed up production of crops edited to be more resistant to disease and drought, and less reliant on chemical fertilisers, in a bid to improve British food security in the wake of the war in Ukraine.
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Dr Jie Li, first author of the study, said: “The Covid-19 pandemic has helped to highlight the issue of vitamin D insufficiency and its impact on our immune function and general health. “The provitamin D enriched tomatoes we have produced offer a muchneeded plant-based source of the sunshine vitamin. That is great news for people adopting a plant-rich, vegetarian or vegan diet, and for the growing number of people worldwide suffering from the problem of vitamin D insufficiency.”
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