Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally with 15 million new cases diagnosed every year. Surgery is a cornerstone in the treatment, and is currently used in 45% of all cancer patients. Despite surgery, cancer recurs in approx. half of the patients. While surgery holds enormous potential, it is greatly underserved. FluoCure aims to develop and clinically test the FluoCure drug. It is composed of a peptide and a fluorophore bound together by a linker. The peptide binds to urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (uPAR), highly specific for tumors, and the fluorophore enables precise thermal ablation and visualization of cancer cells. FluoCure will disrupt cancer surgery with a cancer-targeted photothermal therapy—bringing cellular precision to surgery. The ambition is to test the FluoCure drug in a phase I/II trial in high-grade glioma patients. The patients will directly benefit from a lower recurrence rate and higher survival rate. The society will be able to offer advanced treatment and reduce recurrence-related costs. Following successful clinical translation, the FluoCure drug will be used for other indications. The potential is immense, as more than 80% of the solid cancers express uPAR. This ambitious venture will only be possible with a multidisciplinary team of experts in peptides (UCPH-CHEM), fluorophores (UCPH-FLUO), imaging & cancer models (UCPH-CMI), neurosurgery & clinical trials (RH-Neuro), and business development & regulatory affairs (FluoGuide).

In recent years, a fundamentally different form of information processing has emerged that exploits quantum mechanics. Once realized, quantum computers can efficiently solve classes of problems that would take the lifetime of the universe to solve on conventional supercomputers. Developing quantum hardware with sufficiently low noise, and quantum computing architectures tailored to use it, remain central challenges that currently prevent reaching quantum computers at scale, as required for known useful applications. Photonic quantum computing has a comparative advantage over other approaches because it can scale up to large-scale quantum computing by leveraging pre-existing (classical) semi-conductor photonics technology. The main challenge is to realize core building blocks of sufficiently high quality and to devise resource-efficient quantum architectures. Over the past decades, Danish researchers have developed unique photonic quantum hardware based on deterministic photon-emitter interfaces. In FTQP, we will advance these foundational hardware building blocks and propose fault-tolerant quantum computing architectures tailored to them. The co-design of quantum hardware and computing architecture is considered a highly fruitful approach in order to achieve real progress. The proposed project constitutes a new and highly promising approach to scalable quantum computing that fully exploits a true strong-hold position of Danish researchers.

The GameForGreen project aims to solve the growing global need for reducing household and organisational CO2 emissions through democratic involvement and sustainable consumption. The development of an innovative digital game platform aims to enable consultants, municipalities, companies and organisations to develop and distribute serious games that teach sustainable behaviour to e.g. households, public institutions, housing associations, or employees. Game creators can create games that enable players to choose actions, see their environmental impact, and receive a score based in their consumption practice. The project collaborators include global digital game developer Actee, prominent researchers from Roskilde University, 3 municipalities, sustainability consultants, HOFOR as a utility provider and Implement as a consultant company. The GameForGreen will collect data from the games on the platform and compare these to quantitative real-world data on player consumption of resources collected through ethnographic studies. The data will be fed back to the platform through unique data-compilation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data analytics to explore which game elements can lead to a desirable changed behaviour. GameForGreen will enable new business models for Actee with an influx of customers to their ecosystem. On a societal level, GameForGreen will bridge between regulators and target demographics by teaching households sustainable consumption behaviour.