HORIZON BLOG: European R&D policy newsbytes (Archived_03)

The Polish medtech company SDS Optic is in line for a €10 million loan agreement with the European Investment Bank (EIB), in a show of success for companies backed by the European Innovation Council (EIC). 

The Horizon Europe start-up fund EIC Accelerator gave the company nearly €4 million in funding, and the EIB is now providing further investment to scale up and commercialise its cancer detection technology inPROBE®.   

The EIC Accelerator is a new €7 billion fund under the EU’s Horizon Europe research programme that invests money in risky start-ups to help them grow and attract further investment from private and public funds.  

Martin Kern will stay on as director of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) for another four year term, its governing board has decided. 

Kern, a season Commission bureaucrat, has been director of the EIT since 2019, having previously held the same role in caretaker capacity as interim director.  

The EIT is an EU agency that runs nine sector-specific knowledge and innovation communities (KICs) that provides funding and education opportunities for European entrepreneurs in fields such as innovative energy, climate, health and cultural industries.

The European Association of Research and Technology Organisations (EARTO) is “greatly concerned” with a budget reshuffle in Horizon Europe aimed at finding money for STEP, a new platform for strategic technologies.

In a paper published last week, EARTO says it would be “unacceptable” and counterproductive to take money out of Horizon Europe’s Pillar II and route it to the European Innovation Council (EIC). “Pillar II has a well-established track record of significant RD&I contributions to the policy objectives STEP aims to support,” the paper says.

The European Commission has launched the European Cancer Imaging initiative, a major milestone in its plan to deploy a federated infrastructure of cancer data for researchers, innovators and healthcare providers.

The initiative is part of the EU’s plan for beating cancer and it aims to deploy digital technologies in cancer research, treatment and care, to achieve more precise and faster clinical decision-making, diagnostics, treatments and predictive medicine for the benefit of cancer patients.

The imaging platform is linking 36 datasets of images of nine cancer types, amounting to over 200,000 images of 20,000 patients. More information is available here.

The new EU Commissioner for research and innovation, Iliana Ivanova, this week makes her first official international trip since taking up the role earlier this month as she heads to her native Bulgaria.

Today she will meet with Prime Minister Nikolai Denkov and President Rumen Radev. She will also meet with various other ministers in charge of science, innovation, education and culture. 

On Friday she will give a speech at the Spinoff Bulgaria conference in Sofia. 

Switzerland, Sweden and the US are the world’s most innovative countries in 2023, a new report from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) states.

In its latest edition of the Global Innovation Index, it lists the UK and Singapore as the two other countries to make up the top five. Finland, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and South Korea round out the top 10.

Global government R&D budgets increased between 2021-22, the report says, based on preliminary data. However, this is largely carried by big increases in Japan and South Korea, and to a lesser extent in countries such as Germany. This has made up for budget reductions in many other countries.

Another developing trend is the global value of venture capital investments in innovation, with a big drop off in the past year due to impact by high interest rates.

Read the full report here.