Implementing the Strategic Research Agenda on Personalised Medicine

By providing the right intervention to the right person at the right time, personalised medicine can improve quality of life and contribute to more sustainable healthcare at Member State level. It may drive new and faster development processes and products, providing European life sciences industries with a competitive edge that can secure growth and jobs. Today, development is uneven across and within sectors, regions and Member States due to fragmented activities, insufficient communication and lack of commonly accepted solutions and standards.

The FP7 funded coordination and support action "Personalised Medicine 2020 and beyond – Preparing Europe for leading the global way (PerMed)" was launched in 2013 with the objective to develop a Strategic Research Agenda to progress personalised medicine in Europe. PerMed partners have strived to focus their strategy on concrete research actions, many of which should be addressed through transnational collaborative health research.

An ERA-NET Cofund action is therefore a suitable and timely tool to implement relevant parts of PerMed's Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda, which will be published in 2015.

Scope

Proposals should pool the necessary financial resources from the participating national (or regional) research programmes with a view to implementing a joint call for proposals resulting in grants to third parties with co-funding in this area.

This call should aim at implementing a key area of the PerMed Strategic Research Agenda and be complementary with other funding programmes and activities at European and international level. Proposers are encouraged to include other joint activities including additional joint calls without EU co-funding. This work should be informed by the output of the coordination and support action envisaged in topic SC1-HCO-05-2016 - Coordinating personalised medicine research, without duplicating any of its work.

The proposed ERA-NET should demonstrate the expected impact on national and transnational programmes as well as the leverage effect on European research and competitiveness, and should plan the development of key indicators for supporting this. Participation of international partners is highly encouraged.

The Commission considers that a proposal requesting a contribution from the EU of EUR 5 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Expected Impact

• Deepened and extended coordination of national and transnational research in the field of personalised medicine.
• Streamlined national/regional and international practices in organising research funding.
• Increased interoperability of national research programmes.
• Increased sharing of data and knowledge.
• Increased networking of infrastructures and databases such as ESFRI infrastructures

Cross-cutting Priorities

• International cooperation
• Gender
• Socio-economic science and humanities