Europe aims to reach climate neutrality and a circular economy by 2050. Current practices to recycle batteries are not designed for the full valorisation of the battery materials and, therefore, are not coherent with the European ambitions. To design the vertical battery recycling process compatible with the requirements of circular economy, BeyondBattRec aims at integrating emerging technological and digital tools to enhance the battery recycling rate. The project introduces innovative principles and practices at the component level and rationally integrates the developed components to recover valuable materials with a constant focus on carbon footprint according to the request in Annex II of the new EU Directive (EU) 2019/1020. To achieve its objective, BeyondBattRec puts together a multidisciplinary 13-partner consortium from 7 European member states, consisting of industries, academia, and research & technology organizations. The project targets battery recyclers, manufacturers and technology providers as the end users due to their importance in realizing the objectives of Batt4EU in transforming European battery industry to make it circular and achieve overall climate neutrality at EU level by 2050, while enhancing their global competitiveness. Thanks to innovative steps beyond state of art, BeyondBattRec will allow to comply also with other 2 Annexes of the above Directive (Annex X for management of materials subject to risk of supply for Europe and Annex XII related to minimum recovery rate for said risky and strategic metals and requesting the following recovery rate at the horizon of 2031: (a) 95 % for cobalt; (b) 95 % for Cooper; (c) 80 % for lithium;(d) 95 % for nickel. BeyondBattRec builds on the success of former initiatives and projects which have delivered technological, methodological, patents and largely Europe Dissemination under join venture and licenses. Thanks to those community assets, BeyondBattRec will convincingly and coherently leverage and advance to achieve its objectives.

For the third and fourth edition of “Life is Science” the Austrian Centre of Industrial Biotechnology plans to extend its thematic focus on life sciences to the topic of digitization and has initiated a cooperation with St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences. Together, an open event for the general public in the frame of the European Researchers’ Night is planned in Austria: Life is Science in a Digital World (LiS-Dig). Visitors will gain insights into the every-day work of researchers in the disciplines of life sciences and digitization and their impacts on our daily life. The event offers the participants to discover scientific contents along the following dedicated story lines: Health & Food, Climate & Environment, Culture & Community and Digital Transformation. Visiting laboratories and organizations, putting hands on, discussing with scientists, contributing to open innovation and citizen science and watching demonstrations, the participants will dive into recent scientific discoveries. The "Researchers at School" activities (workshops in school classes) will provide an increased flexibility for schools to attend the event independently from the main events in 2022 and 2023. The envisaged activities aim to allow visitors to identify the connection between research and our daily life. To drive participants’ motivation to be active at LiS-Dig, they will have the possibility to win some gifts (hotel vouchers, book vouchers, experimental kits etc). In this way, some may discover their passion for science and their preference for a research career.

The INTERfaces program will train 14 ESRs within an EID network jointly designed by European academic and industry partners in innovative research projects dedicated to developing clean bioprocesses for the production of chemicals. The assembly of biocatalysts to reaction sequences allows avoiding steps for isolation and purification of intermediates and thus a significant improvement of the environmental footprint of catalytic processes. The main goal of INTERfaces is the extension of this concept towards multi-step biocatalytic reactions in immobilized form. These “Heterogeneous Biocatalytic Reaction Cascades” will greatly facilitate re-use of the catalysts and further simplify downstream-processing. INTERfaces combines material science and protein engineering to design tailored enzymes and (bio-based) materials that will complement each other to obtain optimized heterogeneous biocatalysts. These tools will be applied to solve synthetic challenges in the use of two biobased monomers as starting materials to synthesize products for application fields like antioxidants and biopolymers. Process optimization and up-scale in industry will reveal key factors for synthetic utilization of the biocatalysts. INTERfaces emphasizes particularly the engineering of the designed cascades in solid phase. This includes the design of reactors, use of computational modeling tools, application of the right operational modes, and reaction medium needed for desired space-time-yields and product titers. Commercial relevant processes will be up-scaled together with industry for technical implementation. 13 Non-academic partners ranging from high-tech SMEs to large producing companies and 9 academic institutions offer an intersectoral and interdisciplinary environment to provide 14 Ph.D. candidates with outstanding employability profiles for the European Biotech Sector. Dedicated workshops and well-balanced supervisory team aim at increasing the gender diversity in biotech research.

The Doctoral Network CAARE - Characterization and Recovery of Bionanoparticles for Vaccine Delivery and Gene Therapy focuses on a rapidly emerging field in biopharmaceutical industry and a new class of molecules, the bionanoparticles. Bionanoparticles are currently used as conventional vaccines, mRNA vaccines or gene therapy. These new biopharmaceuticals will satisfy an urgent medical need as they might extend the curability of to-date non-curable diseases and offer treatment for rare diseases. However, the impact of the manufacturing process for such therapies on the final product quality and consequently on product efficacy and patient safety is still not fully understood. There also is a lack of specifically trained personnel in the field of bionanoparticles. In CAARE we will develop new and intensified downstream processes and analytical tools, which are essential to obtain a pure therapeutic product and to ensure the efficacy and safety of the therapy. acib GmbH (AT), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, University of Hamburg and University of Erlangen (all DE), Institute of Experimental Biology and Technology (PT), Leiden University Medical Centre (NL), and Icosagen (EE), seven associated industry partners, two associated universities and one regulatory agency have formed a consortium to train 14 doctoral candidates with beyond state-of-the art bioprocess and analytical skills directed for bionanoparticle purification. Latest technology of process control and monitoring for advanced bionanoparticle processing, downstream process development and particle characterization of bionanoparticles will be taught. The appropriate skills to communicate the research outcome to the scientific community and to the general public are included in the training program. We will establish a new training creating a generation of scientists that can contribute to the establishment of technologies/methodologies in a rapidly emerging field in biopharmaceutical manufacturing.