According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is the world’s largest single environmental health risk. Each year approximately 10 000 people in the Nordic region die prematurely as a result of air pollution exposure, but the question of which pollutants are the most detrimental to health has yet to be resolved. Professor Jørgen Brandt and other participants in the NordForsk project NordicWelfAir are hunting for the answer.
Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC) invites consortia consisting of e-infrastructure providers, developers, researchers and related communities around the Nordic region to propose collaboration projects within e-infrastructure (digital infrastructure) of joint Nordic interest. The proposals may also be initiated by the NeIC Provider Forum.
Major advancements in many fields now make it possible to personalise medical treatment. Still, there are too few products facilitating this in practice, particularly when it comes to treatment that patients themselves carry out at home. The Nordic POP project is looking to change this. “Our goal is to develop pharmaceutical products and technological solutions of the future, where personalised medical treatment is the common link,” says Professor Ingunn Tho of the Nordic POP project and the University of Oslo School of Pharmacy.
The Nordic Committee on Bioethics recently organised the conference Bioethics of clinical innovation and unproven methods in collaboration with Centre for Legal Studies in Welfare and Market at the University of Copenhagen. How are clinical innovations and unproven methods developed and introduced in western Nordic health-care systems? What is the legal and regulatory environment concerning unproven methods in medicine? What ethical principles should guide work on emerging treatments and experimentation in hospitals? These three questions were addressed in separate sessions in a day of fruitful discussions.
The number of cancer survivors among children and young people in the Nordic region has never been greater, but little is known about the challenges this patient group faces in the aftermath of cancer treatment. Survivors of childhood cancer may experience difficulty concentrating, fatigue or depression due to various late effects from the disease and the treatment, and also have an increased risk for a wide array of other diseases. More knowledge is needed about the impacts of childhood cancer on subsequent education, working life and family life. With the help of Nordic health registries, the NordForsk-funded SALiCCS project is taking steps to learn more.
"NordForsk’s new Open Invitation mechanism will play a key role in our future success,” says Lars Kloo, the new Chair of the NordForsk Board. He foresees increased involvement among Nordic research funders when the new mechanism is put into use.
NordForsk; the Academy of Finland; Formas, the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development; Forte, the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare; the Swedish Energy Agency and the Research Council of Norway are issuing a call for proposals under the Nordic Research Programme on Sustainable Urban Development and Smart Cities. The call has a budget of NOK 50 million and the deadline for the call for proposals is 4 June 2019.
Stakeholders taking part at a meeting in December with NordForsk’s Nordic Research Infrastructure Co-operation Committee (NRICC) in Oslo had a chance to discuss the status of Nordic research infrastructure cooperation as well as how best to facilitate and further expand such cooperation.
