Next EU R&D Programme must have reformed grant system, says healthcare sector

The European Union must come up with a more flexible way of allocating grants if it wants to promote healthcare innovation and get more value out of the money it spends on health research in the next Framework Research programme, the three Commissioners who are drawing up the plans were told by members of the healthcare sector at a high level meeting last week.

‘Innovation in Healthcare: from Research to Market’ was jointly organised by the three directorates for Research and Innovation; Enterprise and Industry; and Health and Consumers, to get the views of delegates from across the healthcare innovation chain and inform the planning for the successor to Framework Programme 7 (FP7).

Representatives from universities, research institutions, small and large companies, industry associations, hospital managers and patient associations, were at the meeting. The broad outline for the next research programme will be unveiled in June this year, with the programme due to start in 2014. Within FP7, health research has a budget of €6.1 billion.

“Flexible project time with flexible partnerships that can change during the course of time from innovation to product filing” is a key recommendation, said Nathalie Moll, Secretary General of the industry group EuropaBio, reporting back from a session on how to optimise the grants system to accelerate knowledge creation.

Moll highlighted many weaknesses in the current system, saying newcomers, and in particular SMEs, can be put off by the cost and complexity of submitting an application. To cover the entire life cycle from research and development to market requires multiple submissions to different instruments, she noted. There is a further deterrent in having different rules for different financing instruments, and in some cases the financial rules conflict with local accounting rules, Moll said.

The call for simplification was echoed by Yoram Lev-Yehudi, whose company is involved in two projects that aim to help biomedical SMEs benefit from participating in EU research. “SMEs want less red tape and more flexibility,” Lev-Yehudi told Science|Business, citing as one example making it easier to subcontract aspects of a project. “It’s on the wish list,” he said.

Stéphane Hogan, a head of unit in DG Research and Innovation’s health department, said the Commission already aims to make topics more SME-friendly, keep them broader and to ensure their commercial viability. This will increasingly be the case in the future. “What’s missing is a more rapid cycle,” he said.

Around ten per cent of Europe’s gross domestic product is spent on healthcare, and innovation in healthcare can help to keep this expenditure under control at a time of rapidly rising demand, whilst at the same time promoting the commercial development of European healthcare companies. The importance of healthcare to the economy and its potential contribution to the EU’s 2020 economic strategy was underlined by Commissioner Antonio Tajani, who is responsible for industry and entrepreneurship. “To achieve these objectives, the healthcare sector is a key area which deserves the attention of European and national decision makers,” Tajani said.

Commissioner Maire Geoghegan-Quinn pledged that recommendations from the conference will be taken on board as the plan for the next R&D programme is drawn up.

The conference organisers will publish a report on all the policy recommendations said, Ruxandra Draghia-Akli, director of health in DG Research and Innovation. This will be available on the conference’s website: http://ec.europa.eu/research/health/events-04_en.html