Pre-announcement: a transnational call on standardised measurement, monitoring and/or biomarkers to study food intake, physical activity and health

The French National Research Agency (ANR) will launch an international call in the domain of nutrition and health under the umbrella of the JPI HDHL (“A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life”) and within the framework of the ERA-NET HDHL-INTIMIC. This call will include 10 funding organisations from 8 different countries. The call will be launched on the 28th of January 2021 and applicants will have up to the 31st of March 2021 to submit their proposals.

This new joint transnational call intends to fund dedicated, top-class transnational research consortia to develop improved methods and tools to asses and monitor diet and physical activity in order to provide better dietary and physical activity recommendations and guidelines.

Through this call, the ERA-NET HDHL-INTIMIC will contribute to create or reinforce the collaboration between research partners coming from different countries and different fields to promote research linking nutrition and health. Both public research partners (such as universities, research institutions, and hospitals), private companies and associations will be welcome to join the present call.

Topic of the call

The aim of this call is to encourage the development of improved methods and tools designed to assess and monitor diet and physical activity in order to help promote a healthier lifestyle.

The proposals should address at least one of the following topics:

1. The development of improved methods for dietary assessment using new technologies, this can for example include ICT tools, unobtrusive data, food purchases, etc.;
    
2. The further development of existing/identified biomarkers for food intake (e.g. combination of existing biomarkers to assess eating patterns and/or diet composition; validation of identified biomarkers taking into account influencing factors like gender, genotype or other individual variations);
    
3. Identification of biomarkers of physical activities (also sedentary and sleep behavior) including the first step(s) of validation;
    
4. Approaches to improve scientific application of commercially available devices for objective assessment of physical activity (also sedentary and sleep behavior) as well as develop approaches to process, aggregate and analyse such data in diverse populations;
    
5. The development of integrative tools to assess and monitor both dietary intake and physical activity.

Please note that some of the topics described above and types of research may not be suitable/eligible for all funding organisations.

The consortium should be transdisciplinary and involve 3 to 6 partners eligible for funding from at least three countries participating to the call (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, and Spain). No more than two eligible partners from the same country will be accepted within the same consortium. Two additional partners could also join the consortium if they can fund their own work without requesting money to the funders. ANR will only fund the French partners of the selected projects. The maximum funding allowed is 260 000 euros (or 310 000 euros if the French partner is also the coordinator of the project).

In agreement with the ANR policy, funded researchers should respect the guidelines of the Nagoya protocol and consider open access publication of their results.

Submitted projects will be evaluated in two phases (closure for the submission of pre-proposals: March 31st, 2021; closure for the submission of full proposals: July 22th, 2021)

More Information:

https://www.healthydietforhealthylife.eu

02.04.2021 : Call text webpage