- Email: [email protected]
On the Horizon: Europe’s next round of science funding
M O L E C U L A R O N C O L O G Y 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 3 9 5 e3 9 8
available at www.sciencedirect.com
www.elsevier.com/locate/molonc
News & Views
On the Horizon: Europe’s next round of science funding Michael Dumiak € cherstraße 13, D-10961 Berlin, Germany Blu
Researchers in Europe can start planning for a push toward applied science and collaboration with industrial enterprises and small businesses alike as the European Commission looks ahead in hammering out its next long-term research framework programme, a grant and funding enterprise worth perhaps V80 billion leading through the end of the decade. The role for oncology is still being determined under the new plan; even so, it holds a key place in healthcare research under the current EU funding scheme and seems likely to retain this status. Framework Programme 8dnow to be called Horizon 2020dis currently in mid-stage development in Brussels, with European Commission officials expecting substantial changes ahead in terms of structure, consolidation and working to streamline and simplify its procedures. Instead of spreading its funding over a large menu of specialty topics, potential projects will be grouped under “grand challenges” such as health, climate change or food security. Accounting rules will be more flexible, and though there will be a concerted effort to promote innovation and collaboration with business, officials pledge to retain a focus on basic research. Due to supersede the current Framework Program 7 when it expires after its V1 billion budget year at the end of 2013, plans for Horizon 2020 will go to a European Commission draft proposal in November of this year and be presented to Brussels’ competitiveness council decision-making body in early December.
E-mail address: [email protected] 1574-7891/$ e see front matter doi:10.1016/j.molonc.2011.09.001
Dr. Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, a molecular biologist and director of the Health Directorate at the European Commission’s DirectorateGeneral for Research. “It is clear for everyone that we need to look at innovation: how new ideas can be fostered to all of us as patientsdor as people who would not like to become patients,” says Dr. Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, a molecular biologist and director of the Health Directorate at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research. “If you are looking at exact details for Horizon 2020, it is premature,” she says. “But I would advise to be innovative. This drive to innovation is going to be much stronger. As a community, we want to have excellence
396
M O L E C U L A R O N C O L O G Y 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 3 9 5 e3 9 8
in basic researchdthe applied research of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrowdbut we also want much faster, better and coherent arrival of the research to the patient.”
1.
Under a big tent
Plans for Horizon 2020 call for bringing together in one place all of the Commission’s current research and innovation activities € tt, a senior expert staffer and programmes, says Waldemar Ku in the cabinet of Commissioner Mάire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European Commission’s chief for Research, Innovation and Science. That means the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme and the European Institute of Technology as well; the idea being that common rules and information systems will al€ tt says. low for a much simpler system for users to negotiate, Ku
Mάire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science. Commissioner Mάire Geoghegan-Quinn wants to broaden support for “post-project follow-up, pre-normative research for standard-setting, support to patenting and to nontechnological innovation,” according to Research Europe. € tt, as did all EU officials interviewed for this story, Ku stresses that it is early days yet and that plans are subject to approval and change. Even so the basic structures are emerging, outlined in a European Commission report last year called From Challenges to Opportunities: Towards a Common Strategic Framework for EU Research and Innovation Funding. (full text available here: http://ec.europa.eu/research/horizon2020/ index_en.cfm?pg¼documents). € tt says Horizon 2020 is set to have three distinct but muKu tually reinforcing blocks: excellence in the science base; tackling social challenges; and creating industrial leadership and competitive frameworks. Funding will not be equally divided among the three, he says. “It will be a mix. The grand challenges will get a bit more than the basics, and then the industry,” he says. “But these are not silos. We don’t want to create new silos. There are clearly interactions there. But these are the three areas we want to focus on.” The ‘grand challenges’ block will be the most obvious break from FP7. Draghia-Akli says they are still being defineddworkshops pounding out the internal details for the grand challenges took place only a few months agodbut the superstructure is taking shape.
The grand challenges include items such as: Food Security, Sustainable Agriculture and the Bio-economy; Research Infrastructures; Access to Risk Finance; Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing; Secure, Clean and Efficient Energy; and Smart, Green and Integrated Transport. A full list of the challenges, and reports from the advisory panels currently at work on refining them, are available on the Horizon 2020 site here (http://ec.europa.eu/research/horizon2020/index_en.cfm?pg¼workshops). “This is basically the recognition that we need to focus € tt our research on the grand challenges facing society,” Ku says. “We all know these.” Rounding out this thrust will be a block of grants for fundamental research, and then the creation of financing instruments, for example risksharing facilities which guarantee loans for high-risk research which normal banks would not fund because of the risk profile. As in past framework programmes, projects will benefit from cross-border cooperation and collaboration within the EU, Draghia-Akli says. “The idea of these challenges is to approach a problem that exists and address its resolution in a more strategic, multidisciplinary way, rather than going for super-specializations,” she says. “So for example, ‘health’ doesn’t relate exclusively to health, per se, but also the problems of an aging European population. It is not just therapeutic approaches, but strategies that impact behavioral changes, well-being and a comprehensive approach to problems.” Draghia-Akli retains an optimistic view for oncological research and European funding of novel therapies (on the topic of which she gave a presentation in September at the Ascoli Piceno Conference on Gene Vaccination in Cancer). “Oncology research is one of the winners of the current framework programme,” she says. “The areas are everything from gene environment interactions to prevention and radiology. And we have partners from Africa, India and Latin America, from very translational research to clinical trials, palliative care, registries and quality of life.”
2.
Oncology outlook
Some 54 oncology-related projects at a budget of about V240 million are ongoing under the current framework programme, Draghia-Akli says. A list of 51 current projects at about V204 million is available here. (http://ec.europa.eu/research/health/medical-research/ cancer/projectsfp7_en.html). The projects are varied and involve partners all over Europe. Even so, this is out of an overall Framework Programme 7 that will end up allocating V54 billion when it finishes in 2013. “I would wish to have V54 billion for health research. But we have to look at apples to apples here, and so we look at the budget for health research, which is between V600 million and V700 million a year. Cancer is only one of the areas under major diseases,” Draghia-Akli says. “We are able to fund everything from the development of basic tools and technologies, genomics and proteomics, to public health issues with all the areas of health and medicine covered under this V600 million a year.”
M O L E C U L A R O N C O L O G Y 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 3 9 5 e3 9 8
In fact, FP7 health budgets are due to rise in 2012 and 2013, from V656 million to V765 million, approximately. As DraghiaAkli points out, commission healthcare spendingddepending on how one calculates itdis only somewhere from six percent to 15 percent of total medical research in Europe. Most spending comes from national programs. But researchers still count on the EC’s patronage in order to build cross-border collaborations, both within the EU and outside of it, and as a vital potential source of funding, especially effective when paired with other funding sources. Philippe Mayaud, a professor of infectious disease and reproductive health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, for example, isn’t even an oncologist and yet is still able to coordinate a project on the epidemiology and prevention of cervical cancer in Africa. “I’d like to see more research in this area being commissioned, as it would lead to plausibly more easily eradicated causes of mortality,” Mayaud says. “In particular, I’d like FP8 to maintain some funding stream for developing countries.”
Commission funding is encouraging cross-border partnerships. A lab in the capital of Burkina Faso, Ougadougou, is taking part in the cervical cancer project coordinated by Philippe Mayard. Commission officials are at pains to stress that the themes (and, especially, ideas for budget allocation) are not set for specific therapeutic efforts or for specific diseases under the health grand challenge. But certain topics are emerging, and oncologists in the field have ideas and input about where it should go. For example, the challenge’s focus on aging demographics mean age-related diseasesdof which cancer is onedshould be in the spotlight. Personalized medicine and biomarkers will be part of this research effort, the commission’s workshop document indicates. “In general I am positive about the framework,” says Bart Kiemeny of the Radboud University of Nijemegen, who is coordinating a V6 million project called EuroTARGET which is exploring ways to isolate tumor-related biomarkers for response and toxicity in renal cell cancer, which is part of a broader effort to develop better targeted therapies. “It is, however, quite difficult to meet all the administrative standards of the EC, and sometimes I feel there is a terrible waste of financial resources because of this.” Kiemeny expects cancer prevention, pharmacogenetics and genomics, population-based biobanks of cancer for identification of patients with extreme phenotypes and the
397
integration of data from different platforms to guide the direction of oncology research under Horizon 2020. And while cross-border partnerships have benefits, Kiemeny says the logistical problems are tough. “Sometimes I have the impression that things would be much easier, and equally successful, when you can do it within a single institute,” he says.
3.
Getting ready, and some concerns
Jan Andersen, chairman of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators and executive advisor in the Biology Department at the University of Copenhagen, says he expects researchers to already be deeply involved in working groups and networks, setting agendas and producing ideas for the coming framework programme. Even so, he has concerns about the push toward “result-oriented” research as well as the commission’s promise to simplify procedures under Horizon 2020. “There’s a little concern that this will create limitations to research areas which would otherwise be very interesting from a research point of view,” he says of the innovation drive. “They are risky when seen from a results-driven approach. If there is demand that industry be involved in the beginning, it will be difficult to meet those criteria all the time. There will be a tendency to smooth or guide your project to a more result-oriented outcome, instead of going where the research takes you.” While collaboration with industry is valuable, even vital, managing conflicting interests is going to be crucial to fostering success in that kind of partnership, Andersen says. As for Horizon 2020’s newfound simplicity, Andersen would like to see easier accountingdwhere a project partner’s local accounting work, for example, would not need to be supplemented by special EU accounting, and where the rules remain stable. “My concern is that the commission sees simplification as simplification for the commission, rather than for the applicant.”
CURELUNG team; first row from left to right: Giorgio Scagliotti, Manel Esteller, Lluis Montuenga, Luca Roz, Robert Loewe; second row from left to right: Benjamin Besse, Roman Thomas, Elisabeth Brambilla, Montse Sanchez-Cespedes, John Field, Suvi Savola, Krzysztof Kucharczyk.
398
M O L E C U L A R O N C O L O G Y 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 3 9 5 e3 9 8
This summer was marked by European financiers shuddering in the shadow of instability in the local bond markets, with Greece, Portugal, Italy and France all caught up in the turmoil, even as the UK wrestled with its ongoing austerity measures. There is no guarantee that the Horizon 2020 will get its V80 billion requestdthe FP7 request was at V70 billion, and it got V54 billiondbut researchers and commission officials alike present Horizon 2020 as a benefit, not a cost. € tt says. “You need fiscal consolidation and stability,” Ku “But you also need growth-enhancing measures. Research and innovation is one of them. We can not, and should not, cut growth measures.” Manel Esteller, director of the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program at Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute in
Barcelona, is working on molecular treatments for lung cancer as part of the FP7 under the V3 million CURELUNG project. The project’s formed a comprehensive collection of DNA methylation profiles which are being used to assess new treatments. He says the commission’s research program is strong, but he’d like to see further interest in the development of better treatments and biomarkers for tumors with extremely poor prognosis (i.e. pancreatic cancer and glioma). The European Association for Cancer Research recently named him the Cancer Researcher Award lecturer for 2011; he is a good example of the kind of talent Horizon 2020 could foster in keeping Europe current. He hasn’t started thinking about the next framework, however. “Not yet,” he says. “I am open for collaborations!”
available at www.sciencedirect.com
www.elsevier.com/locate/molonc
News & Views
On the Horizon: Europe’s next round of science funding Michael Dumiak € cherstraße 13, D-10961 Berlin, Germany Blu
Researchers in Europe can start planning for a push toward applied science and collaboration with industrial enterprises and small businesses alike as the European Commission looks ahead in hammering out its next long-term research framework programme, a grant and funding enterprise worth perhaps V80 billion leading through the end of the decade. The role for oncology is still being determined under the new plan; even so, it holds a key place in healthcare research under the current EU funding scheme and seems likely to retain this status. Framework Programme 8dnow to be called Horizon 2020dis currently in mid-stage development in Brussels, with European Commission officials expecting substantial changes ahead in terms of structure, consolidation and working to streamline and simplify its procedures. Instead of spreading its funding over a large menu of specialty topics, potential projects will be grouped under “grand challenges” such as health, climate change or food security. Accounting rules will be more flexible, and though there will be a concerted effort to promote innovation and collaboration with business, officials pledge to retain a focus on basic research. Due to supersede the current Framework Program 7 when it expires after its V1 billion budget year at the end of 2013, plans for Horizon 2020 will go to a European Commission draft proposal in November of this year and be presented to Brussels’ competitiveness council decision-making body in early December.
E-mail address: [email protected] 1574-7891/$ e see front matter doi:10.1016/j.molonc.2011.09.001
Dr. Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, a molecular biologist and director of the Health Directorate at the European Commission’s DirectorateGeneral for Research. “It is clear for everyone that we need to look at innovation: how new ideas can be fostered to all of us as patientsdor as people who would not like to become patients,” says Dr. Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, a molecular biologist and director of the Health Directorate at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research. “If you are looking at exact details for Horizon 2020, it is premature,” she says. “But I would advise to be innovative. This drive to innovation is going to be much stronger. As a community, we want to have excellence
396
M O L E C U L A R O N C O L O G Y 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 3 9 5 e3 9 8
in basic researchdthe applied research of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrowdbut we also want much faster, better and coherent arrival of the research to the patient.”
1.
Under a big tent
Plans for Horizon 2020 call for bringing together in one place all of the Commission’s current research and innovation activities € tt, a senior expert staffer and programmes, says Waldemar Ku in the cabinet of Commissioner Mάire Geoghegan-Quinn, the European Commission’s chief for Research, Innovation and Science. That means the Competitiveness and Innovation Programme and the European Institute of Technology as well; the idea being that common rules and information systems will al€ tt says. low for a much simpler system for users to negotiate, Ku
Mάire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science. Commissioner Mάire Geoghegan-Quinn wants to broaden support for “post-project follow-up, pre-normative research for standard-setting, support to patenting and to nontechnological innovation,” according to Research Europe. € tt, as did all EU officials interviewed for this story, Ku stresses that it is early days yet and that plans are subject to approval and change. Even so the basic structures are emerging, outlined in a European Commission report last year called From Challenges to Opportunities: Towards a Common Strategic Framework for EU Research and Innovation Funding. (full text available here: http://ec.europa.eu/research/horizon2020/ index_en.cfm?pg¼documents). € tt says Horizon 2020 is set to have three distinct but muKu tually reinforcing blocks: excellence in the science base; tackling social challenges; and creating industrial leadership and competitive frameworks. Funding will not be equally divided among the three, he says. “It will be a mix. The grand challenges will get a bit more than the basics, and then the industry,” he says. “But these are not silos. We don’t want to create new silos. There are clearly interactions there. But these are the three areas we want to focus on.” The ‘grand challenges’ block will be the most obvious break from FP7. Draghia-Akli says they are still being defineddworkshops pounding out the internal details for the grand challenges took place only a few months agodbut the superstructure is taking shape.
The grand challenges include items such as: Food Security, Sustainable Agriculture and the Bio-economy; Research Infrastructures; Access to Risk Finance; Health, Demographic Change and Wellbeing; Secure, Clean and Efficient Energy; and Smart, Green and Integrated Transport. A full list of the challenges, and reports from the advisory panels currently at work on refining them, are available on the Horizon 2020 site here (http://ec.europa.eu/research/horizon2020/index_en.cfm?pg¼workshops). “This is basically the recognition that we need to focus € tt our research on the grand challenges facing society,” Ku says. “We all know these.” Rounding out this thrust will be a block of grants for fundamental research, and then the creation of financing instruments, for example risksharing facilities which guarantee loans for high-risk research which normal banks would not fund because of the risk profile. As in past framework programmes, projects will benefit from cross-border cooperation and collaboration within the EU, Draghia-Akli says. “The idea of these challenges is to approach a problem that exists and address its resolution in a more strategic, multidisciplinary way, rather than going for super-specializations,” she says. “So for example, ‘health’ doesn’t relate exclusively to health, per se, but also the problems of an aging European population. It is not just therapeutic approaches, but strategies that impact behavioral changes, well-being and a comprehensive approach to problems.” Draghia-Akli retains an optimistic view for oncological research and European funding of novel therapies (on the topic of which she gave a presentation in September at the Ascoli Piceno Conference on Gene Vaccination in Cancer). “Oncology research is one of the winners of the current framework programme,” she says. “The areas are everything from gene environment interactions to prevention and radiology. And we have partners from Africa, India and Latin America, from very translational research to clinical trials, palliative care, registries and quality of life.”
2.
Oncology outlook
Some 54 oncology-related projects at a budget of about V240 million are ongoing under the current framework programme, Draghia-Akli says. A list of 51 current projects at about V204 million is available here. (http://ec.europa.eu/research/health/medical-research/ cancer/projectsfp7_en.html). The projects are varied and involve partners all over Europe. Even so, this is out of an overall Framework Programme 7 that will end up allocating V54 billion when it finishes in 2013. “I would wish to have V54 billion for health research. But we have to look at apples to apples here, and so we look at the budget for health research, which is between V600 million and V700 million a year. Cancer is only one of the areas under major diseases,” Draghia-Akli says. “We are able to fund everything from the development of basic tools and technologies, genomics and proteomics, to public health issues with all the areas of health and medicine covered under this V600 million a year.”
M O L E C U L A R O N C O L O G Y 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 3 9 5 e3 9 8
In fact, FP7 health budgets are due to rise in 2012 and 2013, from V656 million to V765 million, approximately. As DraghiaAkli points out, commission healthcare spendingddepending on how one calculates itdis only somewhere from six percent to 15 percent of total medical research in Europe. Most spending comes from national programs. But researchers still count on the EC’s patronage in order to build cross-border collaborations, both within the EU and outside of it, and as a vital potential source of funding, especially effective when paired with other funding sources. Philippe Mayaud, a professor of infectious disease and reproductive health at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, for example, isn’t even an oncologist and yet is still able to coordinate a project on the epidemiology and prevention of cervical cancer in Africa. “I’d like to see more research in this area being commissioned, as it would lead to plausibly more easily eradicated causes of mortality,” Mayaud says. “In particular, I’d like FP8 to maintain some funding stream for developing countries.”
Commission funding is encouraging cross-border partnerships. A lab in the capital of Burkina Faso, Ougadougou, is taking part in the cervical cancer project coordinated by Philippe Mayard. Commission officials are at pains to stress that the themes (and, especially, ideas for budget allocation) are not set for specific therapeutic efforts or for specific diseases under the health grand challenge. But certain topics are emerging, and oncologists in the field have ideas and input about where it should go. For example, the challenge’s focus on aging demographics mean age-related diseasesdof which cancer is onedshould be in the spotlight. Personalized medicine and biomarkers will be part of this research effort, the commission’s workshop document indicates. “In general I am positive about the framework,” says Bart Kiemeny of the Radboud University of Nijemegen, who is coordinating a V6 million project called EuroTARGET which is exploring ways to isolate tumor-related biomarkers for response and toxicity in renal cell cancer, which is part of a broader effort to develop better targeted therapies. “It is, however, quite difficult to meet all the administrative standards of the EC, and sometimes I feel there is a terrible waste of financial resources because of this.” Kiemeny expects cancer prevention, pharmacogenetics and genomics, population-based biobanks of cancer for identification of patients with extreme phenotypes and the
397
integration of data from different platforms to guide the direction of oncology research under Horizon 2020. And while cross-border partnerships have benefits, Kiemeny says the logistical problems are tough. “Sometimes I have the impression that things would be much easier, and equally successful, when you can do it within a single institute,” he says.
3.
Getting ready, and some concerns
Jan Andersen, chairman of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators and executive advisor in the Biology Department at the University of Copenhagen, says he expects researchers to already be deeply involved in working groups and networks, setting agendas and producing ideas for the coming framework programme. Even so, he has concerns about the push toward “result-oriented” research as well as the commission’s promise to simplify procedures under Horizon 2020. “There’s a little concern that this will create limitations to research areas which would otherwise be very interesting from a research point of view,” he says of the innovation drive. “They are risky when seen from a results-driven approach. If there is demand that industry be involved in the beginning, it will be difficult to meet those criteria all the time. There will be a tendency to smooth or guide your project to a more result-oriented outcome, instead of going where the research takes you.” While collaboration with industry is valuable, even vital, managing conflicting interests is going to be crucial to fostering success in that kind of partnership, Andersen says. As for Horizon 2020’s newfound simplicity, Andersen would like to see easier accountingdwhere a project partner’s local accounting work, for example, would not need to be supplemented by special EU accounting, and where the rules remain stable. “My concern is that the commission sees simplification as simplification for the commission, rather than for the applicant.”
CURELUNG team; first row from left to right: Giorgio Scagliotti, Manel Esteller, Lluis Montuenga, Luca Roz, Robert Loewe; second row from left to right: Benjamin Besse, Roman Thomas, Elisabeth Brambilla, Montse Sanchez-Cespedes, John Field, Suvi Savola, Krzysztof Kucharczyk.
398
M O L E C U L A R O N C O L O G Y 5 ( 2 0 1 1 ) 3 9 5 e3 9 8
This summer was marked by European financiers shuddering in the shadow of instability in the local bond markets, with Greece, Portugal, Italy and France all caught up in the turmoil, even as the UK wrestled with its ongoing austerity measures. There is no guarantee that the Horizon 2020 will get its V80 billion requestdthe FP7 request was at V70 billion, and it got V54 billiondbut researchers and commission officials alike present Horizon 2020 as a benefit, not a cost. € tt says. “You need fiscal consolidation and stability,” Ku “But you also need growth-enhancing measures. Research and innovation is one of them. We can not, and should not, cut growth measures.” Manel Esteller, director of the Cancer Epigenetics and Biology Program at Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute in
Barcelona, is working on molecular treatments for lung cancer as part of the FP7 under the V3 million CURELUNG project. The project’s formed a comprehensive collection of DNA methylation profiles which are being used to assess new treatments. He says the commission’s research program is strong, but he’d like to see further interest in the development of better treatments and biomarkers for tumors with extremely poor prognosis (i.e. pancreatic cancer and glioma). The European Association for Cancer Research recently named him the Cancer Researcher Award lecturer for 2011; he is a good example of the kind of talent Horizon 2020 could foster in keeping Europe current. He hasn’t started thinking about the next framework, however. “Not yet,” he says. “I am open for collaborations!”