Health

Members of the Excellence Cluster on Health

By combining the expertise of the five IDEA League partner universities and developing collaborative and complementary research in the area of Health, the IDEA League aims to make a significant contribution to society in this field. Our secondary objective is to become the nucleus of a KIC as part of the planned European Institute of Technology (EIT).

Imperial College

Ensuring that the world is prepared for outbreaks of infectious disease is the goal of the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College, launched in 2007. As well as analysing new outbreaks of existing diseases such as polio, the Centre will also focus on infections which could pose a serious threat in the future, such as avian flu.

TU Delft

Three internationally renowned universities in the Netherlands, Delft University of Technology, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University, and the pioneering medical centers Leiden University Medical Center and Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam have formed a Health Science and Technology research partnership, HST.

HST focuses on the interface between medical science and health care and, in particular, on those areas where modern science and technology can make a real difference to society.

http://www.hstresearch.nl/

ETH Zurich

Diabetes is one of the most significant metabolic disorders in the industrialized world. Together with the Roche company and the University of Zurich Hospital, ETH Zurich started a large-scale research initiative using a systems biology approach to combat Type-2 diabetes. The project is centered at ETH Zurich’s Competence Center for Systems Physiology and Metabolic Diseases (CC-SPMD), where metabolic illnesses are the main research interest, with special emphasis on diabetes.

RWTH Aachen University

Since the foundation of the Faculty of Medicine in 1966 and the opening of the University Hospital in 1983, Life Sciences at RWTH Aachen have been ideally placed for cooperative enterprises involving doctors, engineers and natural scientists. While there are a large number of interdisciplinary working groups, it is the Helmholtz Institute of Biomedical Technology that best illustrates the structural integration of the individual disciplines. It was interdisciplinary research that led to a host of medical innovations – e.g. balloon cardiac catheterization, vena cava filters for prevention of embolisms, artificial heart valves from the patient’s own tissue – that are now an unquestioned part of modern patient care. Key areas of medical research are molecular disease aetiology, the neurosciences, and the field of medicine, environment and technology.

ParisTech

Health is the most important stake for mankind. Research on health issues is very active and diverse at ParisTech and benefits from the wide range of expertise of the ParisTech institutes :

• Human nutrition is at the heart of health issues in Europe and all over the world. Numerous ParisTech research teams are involved in such areas and contributions on measurement, modelling and decision support tools are brought. Main areas of research on this topic are :
  1. the understanding of how formulation, elaboration and conservation processes of food permit to promote properties able to improve health consideration ;
  2. the study of the consumer behaviour, the impact of nutrition on human diseases (obesity, cancer, cardio vascular problems) ;
  3. the relation between microbiology and health ;
  4. the economic and policy considerations enabling to better promote health in nutrition policies and strategies.
• Proton therapy : the PROPULSE project aims at proving the technical feasibility of laser proton within four years. Proton therapy is an efficient treatment of cancers in zones which are inaccessible to surgical instruments or difficult to treat by radiotherapy. Proton emission is induced by high-energy, ultra-short impulse laser beams. Another medical application of these lasers is eye surgery, where they can be applied a.o. to the cutting of the cornea.
  
  
• ParisTech has a long tradition in the domain of medical imaging, with a main interest in brain image processing, along with the main hospitals and research centres involved in functional and interventional radiology.
  
  
• Research is also conducted on economics of Health, in particular in relation with risk modelling and assurance.