Can we eliminate rheumatism? And when was Greenland actually green? The ERC honored twenty-nine research proposals with a Synergy Grant worth about €10 million each. Among the lucky ones were four Dutch and Belgian chemists and life scientists.

Tom Huizinga and Manfred Wuhrer (Leiden University Medical Center) together with Portuguese and Croatian research groups will receive €10 million for GlycanSwitch: Glycans as Master Switches of B Cell Activity in Autoimmunity. With their research, they hope to eliminate rheumatoid arthritis from the world. Their research builds on the discovery that patients have glycated antibodies in their blood in the years before they develop symptoms.