The UAB receives two FET-OPEN grants from the European Commission
21/10/2016
The project ArrestAD for the early diagnose of Alzheimer's disease, in which the group led by Lydia Giménez Llort participates, and the project MaQSens, a technology platform to conduct quantum experiments at macroscopic scale, with the participation of the group led by Àlvar Sánchez, will receive FET-OPEN grants from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme.
This is a very selective call. Of the 544 proposals presented in the past call, only 22 were selected, representing 4% of all proposals. Two of these, almost 10% percent, are projects including the participation of the UAB.
The FET-OPEN Novel Ideas for Radically New Technologies call for grants offers financial support to research projects in an incipient state dedicated to novel ideas focused on the future development of radically different technologies, capable of changing society in the following decades. It focuses on testing innovative ideas not programmed as part of current research projects. FET-OPEN is interested in ambitious collaborative projects of foundational character, ground-breaking, risky, with long-term objectives and with an interdisciplinary and synergistic approach.
Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease
The ArrestAD project offers a new vision on the research into Alzheimer's disease, focusing on its causes as the objective with which to obtain an early diagnosis in order to counteract or even stop the pathology. It is based on a recent discovery demonstrating the central role of one type of molecule, heparan sulfates, as the trigger of the biochemical processes which unchains Alzheimer's disease. The project is led by researcher Dulce Papy-Garcia from the Université Paris Est Créteil.
The research group from the UAB Institute of Neuroscience, coordinated by professor from the Department of Psychiatry and Legal Medicine Lydia Giménez-Llort, will be participating in this project by contributing with its knowledge in translational behavioural neuroscience. It additionally provides a new approach which addresses the disease not only from a traditional cognitive approach (loss of memory and judgement typical of this disease), but also focuses on a wide range of neuropsychiatric symptoms (such as agitation, anxiety, apathy, depression, psychosis, insomnia, etc.) associated to the disease and which severely worsens the quality of life of patients and their carers, making it in many cases necessary to institutionalise patients.
Experiments in Quantum Physics at Macroscopic Scale
The MaQSens project aims to establish a completely new technology platform to conduct experiments in quantum physics at a macroscopic scale, study the frontier between the quantum world and our reality and use the results to create new technologies while making use of quantum properties. It aims to take relatively large objects, such as superconductor spheres, to the quantum state with the aim of studying this limit. Apart from the important interest in answering fundamental scientific questions - the limits of quantum physics - the results will serve to design a new generation of devices based on quantum phenomena. This includes working on advances useful for future quantum computers and also the design of a new generation of ultrasensitive sensors which could be important for our society of 'smart cities', self-driving cars and automated processes.