European projects

PragmaTIL is a European project led by the Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology (VHIO) and supported by a consortium of 12 organizations from six countries, including the ”la Caixa” Foundation. The project has received nearly 6 million euros in funding through Horizon Europe, the European Union’s research and innovation framework programme.

Over the next five years (2023–2028), PragmaTIL will carry out a clinical trial to test an improved version of the TIL therapy, a type of cell-based immunotherapy already used to treat various types of cancer. The aim is to enhance its effectiveness, reduce side effects, and expand its clinical use in academic hospitals. The study will focus on patients with melanoma, lung cancer, and cervical cancer.

The project is structured around several work packages, ranging from clinical trial development to patient involvement. This latter component is led by the Gustave Roussy Institute and the ”la Caixa” Foundation, with support from IrsiCaixa’s Living Lab for Health. In this context, the ”la Caixa” Foundation, in collaboration with IrsiCaixa, is responsible for developing patient-centered tools and activities aimed at empowering patients and fostering their active engagement throughout the entire clinical process.

The living lab approach applied in PragmaTIL seeks to bring research closer to real-life needs by working side by side with end users. Although still uncommon, patient participation in medical research is essential. Trials like PragmaTIL, which involve patients from the earliest stages of clinical protocol development, open the door to meaningful insights—because no one knows better than patients themselves what matters to them, what benefits they value, and what they truly need.

LIV:IN seeks to become a flagship initiative for the effective integration of RRI in industry that is transferable across sectors. This project specifically focuses on the information and communications technology (ICT) industry and smart future living.

LIV:IN will create both physical and virtual spaces for co-creating smart future living systems together with and for industrial technology providers, application developers, and citizens in line with the principles of RRI. The project follows an opportunity-oriented approach and acknowledges RRI as a means to consider societal concerns and to co-create new business opportunities. As a result of these activities, LIV:IN will engage industry leaders, experts and citizens to experiment with responsible ways of co-creating innovations for smart future living.

Website and more information coming soon.

The European project RRI Tools, led by the ”la Caixa” Foundation and financed by the European Commission within its Seventh Framework Program (FP7), was carried out over a three-year period (2014-2016) by a multi-disciplinary consortium made up of 26 institutions from 30 countries in the European Research Area, distributed into 19 active RRI Hubs.

The purpose of the RRI Tools project was to develop an interactive digital platform - the RRI Toolkit - gathering a wealth of resources to help stakeholders across Europe in developing their understanding of, and capacity to put responsible research and innovation into practice. To complement all these resources, RRI Tools developed a training program with a set of materials and more than ninety seminars run throughout Europe.

The project officially concluded at the end of 2016. Nevertheless, the project’s coordinator, ”la Caixa” Foundation, continued to maintain the RRI Toolkit updated and running and its dissemination channels active for an extended period. Over time, the platform became a widely used resource within the R&I community in Europe, and beyond. With the launch of the 9th Framework Programme – Horizon Europe, by the end of 2024 the decision was made to close the platform. Its legacy now continues through new projects and other initiatives that build on the foundations laid by RRI Tools.

The GENDER-NET project began in the year 2013 with an award of assistance by the European Commission with the primary aim of meeting the common challenges still faced by European research institutions in achieving gender equality in research and innovation.

The project ended in October 2016, but because of its success over these three years, it has received a further subsidy to extend it for five more years (2017-2022), giving rise to GENDER-NET Plus ERA-NET Cofund.

With the ”la Caixa” Foundation and the Spanish ministry of Finance, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO) as Spanish partners, this project depends on a consortium of sixteen organisations with the primary aim of reinforcing transnational cooperation between the owners and managers of research programmes, giving support to the promotion of gender equality through institutional change and encouraging the inclusion of sex and gender analysis in finance and research programmes. 

To achieve this, the first international call has been launched with a financial allocation of €9M for research and gender projects based on the Sustainable Development Goals and, specifically, in the following fields:

- Health and welfare.
- Infrastructures, industrialisation and innovation.
- Climate change.

The projects must be multinational with at least 3 different countries represented in the consortium and they must be led by non-profit organisations, universities and university foundations, research centres, technological centres, hospitals or hospital foundations.

The call is open until 1 March 2018.

You can check all of the documents needed for the call and access the application platform on this link.

The aim of the COMPASS project is to analyse how Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) can be included in a meaningful way in the innovation systems that exist in European industry.

Thus, it sets out to provide evidence for better absorption of RRI in research, development and innovation (RDI) and to foster cooperation in three key fields of innovation: biomedicine, nanotechnology and cyber-security. Another goal is the sustainable, responsible promotion of RDI in the running of highly innovative companies.

To develop responsible innovation road maps, the project will involve compiling evidence of the benefits of RRI to industry through interviews with professionals, case studies of companies in the sectors assessed and organising “Responsible Innovation Laboratories”.

The ”la Caixa” Foundation takes part in the project by designing and starting up the “Responsible Innovation Laboratories”, specifically in the biomedical sector in Catalonia, and leads communication and dissemination of the measures.

EIT Health is a unique European Union initiative to stimulate innovation and entrepreneurial spirit throughout Europe under the auspices of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The EIT Health consortium won a competitive round of tendering run by the EIT in 2015 to be the vehicle for promoting innovation in biomedicine and health in the European Union in the next seven years.

EIT Health collaborates with the ”la Caixa” Foundation through the CaixaImpulse Innovation programme, supporting biomedical research projects with the potential to transfer the results of their research to society through the setting up of spin-offs or licences.

The aim of the HEIRRI project (from HEI, Higher Education Institutions, and RRI, Responsible Research and Innovation) with the help of the ”la Caixa” Foundation, is to incorporate the concept of RRI in scientific and engineering degree courses, and to work essentially through universities and other higher education institutions (HEIs).

The project lasts for three years and has a budget of about one and a half million euros, financed by the European Commission Horizon 2020 programme, among others.