This week’s updates highlight stronger disease surveillance, a new agri-food innovation strategy, the European Innovation Act, biodiversity research funding and breakthrough EIC projects in AI and biomedicine.
🧪 EU4Health - Strengthening national disease surveillance systems
HaDEA has highlighted EU4Health grants supporting national efforts to improve and strengthen infectious-disease surveillance systems across Europe.
The supported actions include better data collection and reporting, digital surveillance tools, interoperability, laboratory and epidemiological capacity, workforce training and preparedness for cross-border health threats.
Source: European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA)
🌾 EU Agri-Food - New research and innovation strategy launched
The European Commission has adopted a new Strategic Approach to Research and Innovation for agriculture, forestry, rural areas and food systems, bringing together AgRI 2040 and Food 2040.
The approach aims to connect research with deployment and market uptake, support startups, scale-ups and SMEs, and accelerate innovation in areas including digitalisation, artificial intelligence and robotics.
Source: Agriculture and rural development
🚀 European Innovation Act - From research to market
The European Commission has proposed the European Innovation Act to help innovative ideas developed in Europe move more effectively from research to market and scale across borders.
The proposal would strengthen the Single Market for innovation through a harmonised framework for R&D procurement and an EU-wide framework for intellectual property valuation and commercialisation.
Source: Research and innovation - European Commission
🌿 Biodiversa+ - €40M research call on novel ecosystems
Biodiversa+ has launched the BiodivFuture call with a total budget of around €40 million to support innovative research on novel ecosystems.
The funded projects will examine biodiversity, socio-ecological consequences and future ecosystem trajectories, producing actionable knowledge to support nature-positive transformation and reverse biodiversity decline.
Source: Research and innovation - European Commission
🤖 EIC - First Advanced Innovation Challenges projects launched
The European Innovation Council has selected 20 projects from 709 proposals for the first stage of its Advanced Innovation Challenges pilot, focused on Physical AI and new biomedical research methods.
Each project will receive €300,000 for up to nine months to test and validate its solution, while the most promising projects may progress to a second stage with up to €2.5 million in further support.
Source: European Innovation Council