ALTERNATIVE at Kick-Off Meeting of European Green Deal Chemicals’ Cluster
On 3rd February, a kick-off cluster event was organized by European Research Agency for the projects under work programme topic “Building a low-carbon, climate resilient future: Research and innovation in support of the European Green Deal”. More than 60 participants across Europe attended the online event. It brought together representatives from EU agencies and the Cluster projects ALTERNATIVE, LIFESAVER, PANORAMIX, PROMISCES, SCENARIOS and ZeroPM.
The event started with welcome note by Paul Webb from the European Research Executive Agency (REA) about looking at the effect of chemicals on nature. It was followed by a number of other presentations and short project pitches.
The participating projects were asked to present their project pitch on the main objectives, technology, challenges and relation with key EU policies and initiatives. For the ALTERNATIVE project, coordinator Gianluca Ciardelli from Politecnico Torino presented the project objectives and how they will be achieved. He explained how ALTERNATIVE will develop an innovative platform that will be able to detect the cardiotoxicity of chemicals and their bio-transformation products. This novel platform will enable regulators and industry to identify, quantify and prevent cardiotoxic co-exposures to industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals in a cost-effective way. Project results and expected impacts will particularly focus on cardiotoxic effects on older people, which is of high relevance in view of the ageing EU population and the high spread of cardiovascular diseases. 
After the presentations, the event progressed with participants split into parallel thematic sessions. The groups discussed policy contributions and follow-up clustering actions between projects. The brainstorming sessions led to next steps on collaborations among projects, platforms, dissemination, communication and exploitation strategies.
This activity was quite engaging and interactive. Diverse ideas were captured from different work groups, which brought synergies and insights. Towards the end, the session results were reported in the plenary as basis for further Cluster activities.
