Fostering a European Research Area for Health Research

Excellent EU programs push health R&I but are not sufficient. Synergy with strategic initiatives in MS and a new model for impactful collaborations are needed to address the challenges for health. ERA4Health brings the opportunity to increase EU transnational collaborative research funding by creating a funding body for joint programming in priority areas addressing EU Public Health Needs, with total duration of 12 years. The main ambition of the partnership it is the contribution to the goal of Europe to be at the forefront of science and innovation in Health Research by 2050 and enhancing the biomedical research to provide a better health for citizens, not only in Europe but at international level.

ERA4Health focuses on tackling diseases and reducing disease burden and the following challenges: 1) the increasing demand for a better quality of life and a better care of patients, 2) the need to transform public health care systems in more effective, efficient, equitable, accessible, and resilient ones and 3) the need to strengthen disease prevention and health promotion. In this view, ERA4Health objectives are:

.SO1- Support relevant medical research including clinical fields and intervention areas (prevention, diagnosis, treatment)

.SO2- Improve the utilisation of existing health technologies in clinical practice

.SO3- Build capacity, in particular in conducting Investigator Initiated Clinical Studies at EU scale

.SO4- Implement and advance the practice of RRI across the breadth of the programme

ERA4Heatlth will be implemented in 2 phases:

. Phase 1 (3 years) will implement joint calls focused on nutrition and lifestyle-related diseases, cardiovascular diseases and nanomedicine (4 calls in the first 2 years). In parallel, it will establish a supporting framework to overcome the challenges in launching international IICSs joint calls.

. Phase 2 (9 years): after the EC approval, additional multinational calls for IICSs and joint calls for other priority areas will be launched in accordance with the decision of the Health Programme Committee taken at the end of previous Phase 1.

This Phase 2 of the Partnership will continue supporting relevant medical research and new knowledge generation in the research priority areas stablished in the ERA4Health long-term Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), with a particular focus devoted to support and fund multi-country Investigator-Initiated Clinical Studies (IICS). The research priority areas included in the SRIA are: nutrition and life-style related diseases, prevention and public health strategies, cardiovascular diseases, nano and advanced technologies for disease prevention, diagnostic and therapy.

ERA4Health will fund non-commercial multi-country IICS to enhance this impactful and added value clinical research. The additional activities in ERA4Health Phase 2 will serve to provide support and building capacity in conducting multi-country IICSs and to overcome the identified challenges and obstacles in these type of IICSs.

34 partners (20 from EU, 3 Third Countries associated to HE and 2 non-associated, non EU), will commit 90,510,000€, during the 3 first years, as financial support to third parties.

10 new partners, mainly funders of multi-country Investigator-Initiated Clinical Studies, are added to the ERA4Health consortium in its Phase 2. In total, 47 partners from 27 countries will be included in the ERA4Health consortium, with additional financial support to third parties in Phase 2 (186,150,000.00 €).