Between 30 and 40 million people in Europe suffer from rare diseases —many of them children. As most of these diseases have genetic origins, gene therapy is a major hope for their future cure .

Patients with Acute Intermittent Porphyria (AIP) are permanently tired. They continuously suffer acute pain, severe motor affection and an array of neurological problems. AIP affects one in 10,000 people in the EU.

Runny nose, watery eyes and cough; these are the symptoms associated with respiratory allergies. About 20% to 30% of Europeans suffer from some type of respiratory allergy , according to the European Federation of Allergy and Airway Diseases Patients Associations .

We age in two ways. There is the ageing we count by clock and calendar. And then there is biological ageing. The latter is written into our genes. But, it is also influenced by our lifestyle and history.

What makes us age biologically? We have always been intrigued by this question. Yet, it remains a fundamental research challenge.  Now, the EU-funded project, EurHEALTHAgeing , aims to draw together studies of early development with those on longevity and ageing.

Viruses often get bad press. Likened to Trojan horses they are often associated with disease. But, i t is precisely because of their infectious nature that they can potentially be used as gene vectors - which are vehicles loaded with good copies of malfunctioning genes - and delivered to cells.

Brain diseases are particularly challenging to treat. Every substance that has to be delivered to the brain needs to overcome several obstacles, such as the blood-brain barrier—a system that prevents potentially dangerous substances, but also many drugs, to enter this organ—,to get to its target.

Scientists in Würzburg, in Germany, have created living bone material from human stem cells in their laboratory. The discipline is called tissue engineering and the aim of the scientists is to produce the perfect substitute for bone transplantation.

Bone is one of the most frequently transplanted tissues. And the demand is rising. Transplants treat large defects like those caused by trauma, complicated fractures, tumour resection or osteoporosis. ...

Bone grafts are among the most sought after tissue transplants in clinical practice. And this demand is expected to rise due to an ageing population.

Anthropogenic emissions have, until now, been collected, but not harmonised . These consist, for example, of data of nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions, smog, methane, CO 2 and even pollen and dust produced, among others by heavy industry and power plants.

Cancer: about one in three Europeans is confronted with this diagnosis during their lifetime. Scientists at the German Cancer Research Center DKFZ in Heidelberg are investigating the development of cancerous cells to find out how their growth is controlled and what goes wrong in cancer cells.

In 2012, about 8.2 million people died of cancer making the disease a major cause of death worldwide. According to the WHO World Cancer Report 2014 , this figure is expected to rise within the next two decades.

Targeted therapies have revolutionised the treatment of cancer since they were first introduced. Amongst the first medications approved in Europe, was the breast cancer drug Herceptin , which was approved in 2000.

Cancer has turned my life upside down . It touched my body, my deepest identity. I started questioning myself about the meaning of life, about death, about what it means to have a changing body that would soon undergo major therapies and go through early menopause.

Maxime Lebigot is a nurse. Back in 2016, he and his wife Elodie had their first child . They were very happy, but when they moved to Laval, a town of some 50,000 inhabitants in north-western France, they soon realised that no doctor was available to take charge of him .

Calin lives in the Romanian city of Cluj. He suffers from melanoma and his mother died from colorectal cancer, aged 58. “It took two months just for a colonoscopy,” he recalls.

When Salvatore was diagnosed with brain cancer, he made headlines all over the world . International outlets like CNN and the BBC presented him as “the hacker who decrypted his medical records to create his open-source therapy”.

PCR tests have been hailed as the gold-standard in detecting and isolating COVID-19 cases. But they are more expensive than antigen tests and need a laboratory to process.

Evidence from early adoption of digitisation central to the new European Union Clinical Trials Regulation suggests that the Regulation will revolutionise the region’s competitiveness .