New Ways to Boost Innovation in Health Care

“The EU share of knowledge production is declining. Business R&D is stagnating. Triggered by the crisis and fierce global competition we face enormous challenges. These require a coordinated and targeted response.”, resumed Dr. Ruxandra Draghia-Akli during the Opening Ceremony of the conference on the 7th October in the Museo Capitolini in Rome. Part of this targeted response is the ‘Innovation Union’, announced by EC just one day before. This flagship initiative will drive innovations in areas such as healthy aging at the highest political level. Framework conditions - including facilitated access to finance for research and innovation - will be improved to ensure that innovative ideas can be turned into products and services that create growth and new jobs. Dr. Draghia-Akli acknowledges that the biological and medical science (BMS) infrastructure initiatives such as EATRIS will empower world-class research to bring forward innovative results. EATRIS is one of the infrastructure projects prioritized in the first roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) and funded by the 7th Framework Programme (FP7) of the EC.

Prof. Carlo Rizzuto, President of Elettra, Sincrotrone Trieste, and Chair of ESFRI from 2008-2010, pointed out that experiences in several different fields already have proven that international research infrastructures are a motor for innovations. Modern research needs state-of-the-art technology and these sophisticated platforms are attracting the best researchers in the world. Not only research benefits from that interplay, national and regional innovation clusters will evolve as innovative institutions act as attractors for industry and high tech businesses.

The multidisciplinary approach is one pre-requisite for translational medicine, stated Francesco Marincola, Chief of Immunogenetics, NIH Clinical Center, Bethesda, USA and identified the special need for translational efforts to: find cost-effective solutions for chronic medical conditions that represent 2/3 of Health Care spending, test the novel diagnostic and therapeutic opportunities supplied exponentially by the high throughput of modern biotech efficiently and develop highly predictive pre-clinical models and useful surrogate biomarkers.

Ideally the information in translational research is shared in two directions: from bench to bedside and from bedside to bench. “EATRIS aims at bridging the gap between the laboratory and clinic. We like to improve translational research by providing cross-disciplinary translational centres and by fostering collaborations across Europe”, explained Prof. Rudi Balling, EATRIS Project Coordinator and Director of the Luxembourg Centre of Systems Biomedicine (LCSB). Besides a pan-European cutting edge research infrastructure, access to patients, translational expertise and knowledge will be available in each EATRIS Centre. “EATRIS will provide open access for the best ideas from the biomedical research community. This will help to fully exploit the biomedical potential in Europe”, resumed Balling the concept behind EATRIS.

To read the report in full length please click here.

We once again thank our speakers for their excellent presentations and their kind agreement to make their charts available online. Please click below to download the presentations:

• R. Balling - “Meeting Challenges in Translational Research. EATRIS: A Pan-European Action Plan”
• R. Draghia-Akli – “European Union Health Research in the Innovation Union”
• B. Eisele – “EATRIS: Innovating Research, Speeding Development, Increasing & Capturing Value
• S. Ljunghall – “Translational Research from an Industry perspective”
• F. de Man – “How we make EATRIS successful”
• F. Marincola – “Present and an Outlook in Translational Research”
• L. Piovesan –"Funding Biomedical Research. An International Institution Perspective.”
• C. Rizzuto –“International Research Infrastructures: Motors for Excellence”
• F. Rouault – “AFM: Patient Organisation and Innovative Translational Research”
• C. Schneider – “Finding New Ways for Regulatory Solutions”