Whenever you eat strawberries, does your throat start to swell and itch? Do you also get a burning or prickling sensation in your lips, gums, tongue or inside your cheeks? Or perhaps drinking milk ...

High pressure to preserve and sterilize some foods, prolonging their shelf life: this old method of food preservation is called High Pressure Processing (HPP) or Pascalisation, from the name of the 17th century French scientist Blaise Pascal, famous for studying the effects of pressure on fluids.

In Europe, the population is ageing . In 2010, about 17% of the population were 65 or older. This number is projected to increase to 30% of the population by 2060. New services are already available to meet their needs.

Every year nearly 50.000 dialysis patients worldwide receive a kidney transplant, but depending on the type of donor between 20 to 60% of the implanted kidneys are not working .

Aspiring new drugs face long and stringent tests on safety and effectiveness before making it to market. And rightly so. But giving drugs special designations that bring with them the right incentives can help bring them to patient.

It is not uncommon for kidney transplants to fail. Once transplanted, the kidney must connect back with the blood supply to start working properly and be truly accepted by the body. Delays can cause complications.

Fourteen pairs of identical twins joined the EU funded medical project “ Fight-MG ”, to fight Myasthenia Gravis . This rare autoimmune disease leads to abnormal fatigability of various skeletal muscles.

Myasthenia Gravis (MG) is a rare auto-immune disease—whereby patients’ immune systems attack their own bodies— arising from a breakdown in communications between the nervous and muscular systems.

Collaboration between research groups is key in tackling rare diseases such as auto-immune disease Myasthenia Gravis (MG). Indeed, the rarity of the disease means that it can be difficult to collect enough samples of blood and tissues to perform quality research.

Personalised medicine is one of the new developments that is deemed to revolutionise health care. A key component is the detection of biomarkers, proteins in blood or saliva, for example, whose presence or abnormal concentration is caused by a disease.

Until now, few biosensors have had the required sensitivity to detect single molecules. A novel approach for improved biosensor sensitivity has opened new avenues for developing new kinds of biosensors.

Angeles suffers from a severe and rare genetic disease called Acute Intermittent Porphyria (AIP). This means, one of her genes restrains her liver to produce a specific protein needed for the metabolism of the blood.

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.