PREVENT improves upscaling of primary interventions for weight control management during childhood and adolescence to reduce cancer risks in adulthood. This relies on current evidence that relates excess body weight with increased cancer risk. Towards this end, PREVENT applies a series of implementation research actions in the following directions. First, it identifies barriers to current interventions and policies preventing them from upscaling to different geographical, socio-economic, and cultural settings. Then, it introduces new multi-actor and context-aware interventions along with new user engagement strategies to face the current upscaling bottlenecks; multi-actor in the sense that they target different types of users (e.g., students, family, educators, policymakers) and context-aware in the sense that PREVENT interventions are tailored to the specific implementation places (class, canteen, sports fields, labs, outside school). The PREVENT new policies are adapted, piloted, and scaled up within the schools’ communities of three European countries facing different epidemiological settings on childhood obesity, geographic, socio-economic and cultural attributes. The pilots are designed to be holistic end-to-end ecosystems, including users, medical professionals, policymakers, public authorities, and civil communities. They focus on the whole school communities of Greece, Sweden, and Spain-Catalonia, that is, PREVENT outreach to more than 3.3 million students, required for guideline provisioning, large-scale implementation, multi-parameter assessment, and scaling-up. Co-creation, active behavioral change, self-evaluation through user empowerment, motivational interviewing, social innovation, digital-assistive engagement, health apps, and multi-domain assessment are implementation research aspects of PREVENT to advance user acceptability and compatibility with existing policies, and thus improve sustainability and upscaling. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on "Prevention and Early Detection".

The One Health concept recognizes that the human health is tightly connected to the health of animals and the environment, i.e. that animal feed, human food, animal and human health, and environmental contamination are closely linked. These are the main focus of our European joint programme (EJP). One reference laboratory from the public health / medicine domain and one reference laboratory from the food / veterinary domain are associated within a network of 41 European laboratories and research centers, distributed in 19 participating member states, with the aim to reach significant advances in the fields of foodborne zoonoses (FBZ), antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and emerging threats (ET) within a global One Health approach. Most of these laboratories have reference responsibilities, representing a sustainable framework for an integrated research community. Consistent with the “Prevent-Detect-Respond” concept, the One Health EJP aims at reinforcing collaboration between institutes by enhancing transdisciplinary cooperation and integration of activities by means of dedicated Joint Research Projects, Joint Integrative Project and through education and training in the fields of FBZ, AMR and ET. While alignment and harmonization with on-going EC-funded research project will also be considered, deliverables from the EJP activities should feed the approach of evidence based risk assessment and therefore the management of risks by the competent national authorities. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to efficiently and regularly updated the dissemination of knowledge between the research community and major International and European stakeholders, national authorities and further afield. The One Health EJP will also develop sustainable programs and projects beyond the lifetime of the EJP, through the production of a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (2021-2030) and a European P2P One Health Cooperative Joint Initiative.

Childhood and adolescent obesity is a major global and European public health problem. Currently, public actions are detached from local needs, mostly including indiscriminate blanket policies and single-element strategies, limiting their efficacy and effectiveness. The need for community-targeted actions has long been obvious, but the lack of monitoring and evaluation framework and the methodological inability to objectively quantify the local community characteristics, in a reasonable timeframe, has hindered that. Fortunately, technological achievements in mobile and wearable electronics and Big Data infrastructures allow the engagement of European citizens in the data collection process, allowing us to reshape policies at a regional, national and European level. In BigO, that will be facilitated through the development of a platform, allowing the quantification of behavioural community patterns through Big Data provided by wearables and eHealth- devices. During the project, BigO will reach out to more than 25.000 school and age-matched obese children and adolescents as sources for community data. Comprehensive models of the obesity prevalence dependence matrix will be created, allowing, for the first time the data-driven effectiveness predictions about specific policies on a community and the real-time monitoring of the population response, supported by powerful real-time data visualisations. In short, BigO will provide an innovative new suite, allowing the Public Health Authorities to evaluate their communities based on their obesity prevalence risk and to take local action, based on objective evidence. BigO does not aim to redefine, from the ground-up, the existing obesity-related policy strategies targeting childhood obesity prevalence. BigO does, however, aim to redefine the way those strategies are designed and deployed in the European societies.