The national funding organisations of the Netherlands, Estonia, Finland, France, Great Britain, Italy, Latvia and Poland jointly provided funds in the order of €8 million to support the European call. The research projects were funded for three years in consortia with a minimum of three participants from at least three countries and a maximum number of 8 research groups. Regardless of its size, each collaborative consortium should have the optimal critical mass to achieve ambitious scientific goals and should clearly show the added value from working together. The ERA-NET PrioMedChild received €1.7 million from the European Commission's DG Research to set up the network and collaboration, but no funds for research. The Joint Call was funded out of national research budgets. Partnerships between research funding organisations seek to bring coherence and cooperation to national research programmes and policies on research on Priority Medicines for Children.

We are happy to announce that six projects submitted in the ERA-NET PRIOMEDCHILD Joint Call of 2010 received a grant.

Contact
Dr. Harald Moonen, Network coordinator and project manager
t: +31 70 349 5349 / e: moonen(at)zonmw.nl

E-Rare (ERA-Net on rare diseases) is a network of sixteen partners – public bodies, ministries and research funding organizations – from twelve countries, responsible for the development and funding of national/regional research programs on rare diseases. E-Rare fosters research on rare diseases in Europe and associated countries. E-Rare partners systematically exchange information on rare diseases research and organise joint funding initiatives.

Contact:
Sophie Koutouzov, E-Rare Coordinator
t: +33 1 58 14 22 82 / e: skoutouzov(at)gis-maladiesrares.net

In order to gain insight into this shift towards what is called today ‘personalised medicine’, and into the needs in terms of research programmes, infrastructures, policy and education, the European Science Foundation (ESF) has decided to launch an foresight exercise – a Forward Look - to explore the scientific and social aspects of how personalised medicine might advance in the future. Due to the broad and complex basis of this area, the present Forward Look is fully supported by all ESF Standing Committees including the Standing Committees for Life, Earth & Environment (LESC), Medical Sciences (EMRC), Social Sciences (SCSS), Physical and Engineering Sciences (PESC) and the Humanities (SCH).

The European Science Foundation (ESF) was established in 1974 to provide a common platform for its Member Organisations to advance European Research collaboration and explore new directions for research. It is an independent organisation, owned by 78 Member Organisations, which are research funding organisations, academies and learned societies from 30 countries. ESF promotes collaboration
in research itself, in funding of research and in science policy activities at the European level.

The European Diagnostic Clusters Alliance (EDCA) aims to foster and develop collaborative networking between European diagnostic clusters in order to consolidate the competitiveness of their SMEs.
Access to non-EU markets (USA and Asia) for European medical diagnostic SMEs is also a key objective to the EDCA members.

Together the partners are gathering 330 diagnostic companies (mostly SMEs) and 46 Universities. The founding partners expect that other European diagnostic clusters may soon join the club.

The European Diagnostic Clusters Alliance has been making increasing efforts to find the necessary financial resources to develop and transform this network into a true European world-class cluster.
This is why they have joined their forces and shared their experience to participate in the call for projects launched by the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP- DG Enterprise and Industry): “Promoting international cluster activities in Europe”.

Contact
Franck Molina, President
t: +33 4 6716 6600  / e: franck.molina(at)sysdiag.cnrs.fr

HealthTIES consortium addresses Europe’s greatest health challenges for the 21st century: the increasingly ageing population and the sustainability of the healthcare system.

True collaboration between medical scientists and engineers, as well as health care providers, industrial partners and regional authorities is currently seen as the key to innovation that will ultimately lead to improved health and sustainable health care.

These initiatives have been described as the “third revolution” in healthcare research. HealthTIES is at the forefront of this third revolution by providing a transnational consortium in medical technology that intends to maximise the impact of innovation and RTD (Research and Technological Development) for the benefit of health care.

The common goals of the HealthTIES regions are 1) to stimulate joint science, education and state-of-the-art infrastructure in major disease areas; and 2) to boost the Healthcare Technology Innovation Cycle.

Contact:
e: info(at)healthties.eu

The consortium focuses on the identification of reliable predictive biomarkers to approved agents with anti-angiogenic activity for which no reliable predictive biomarkers exist: sunitinib, a multi-targeted tyrosine kinase inhibitor and everolimus, a mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway inhibitor.

Through the analysis of tumour tissue derived from pre-operative renal cell carcinoma (RCC) clinical trials, the PREDICT consortium will use established and novel methods to integrate comprehensive tumour-derived genomic data with personalised tumour-derived shRNA and high throughput siRNA screens to identify and validate functionally important genomic or transcriptomic predictive biomarkers of individual drug response in patients.

PREDICT’s approach to predictive biomarker discovery differs from conventional associative learning approaches, which can be susceptible to the detection of chance associations that lead to overestimation of true clinical accuracy. These methods will identify molecular pathways important for survival and growth of RCC cells and particular targets suitable for therapeutic development. Importantly, our results may enable individualised treatment of RCC, reducing ineffective therapy in drug resistant disease, leading to improved quality of life and higher cost efficiency, which in turn should broaden patient access to beneficial therapeutics, thereby enhancing clinical outcome and cancer survival.

The consortium will also establish and consolidate a European network providing the technological and clinical platform for large-scale functional genomic biomarker discovery.

By concentrating transnational resources TRANSCAN will provide a critical financial and scientific mass for tackling large scale problems, relevant for improving translational cancer research in each Member State or Associated Country as well as overall in Europe.
The objectives of TRANSCAN will be achieved through interconnected activities, structured into six work packages (WP) and facilitated by the project coordination and management (WP1). A survey and analysis of national cancer research funding (WP2) will provide a comprehensive picture of the nature and extent of translational cancer research funding in the EU. Based on this knowledge, TRANSCAN will identify gaps in and opportunities for coordinated translational research, and will thus contribute to the development of a coordinated funding research policy shared by European countries. Based also on the outcome of these activities, three joint transnational calls for multinational translational cancer research programmes will be designed (WP3) and implemented (WP4). In this context, training programmes/activities of multi-disciplinary translational cancer research teams will be supported (WP5). The TRANSCAN performance will be monitored and confronted with the partners? expectations, and a sustainability plan for the network beyond TRANSCAN will be elaborated (WP6), contributing to the building of a pan-European platform for translational cancer research.