The EurocanPlatform was born really because of the fact that Commissioner already in 2002 realised that there was a problem with cancer research because discoveries in basic research were very positive but translating that into improvement of patient lives was not really optimum. So he really realised that there was a lot of fragmentation in the way we do research and there was duplication and there were too many barriers that needed to be addressed. So actually he consulted a few members of the cancer community to be able to find out how you could deal with that. As a result of that a call was made in FP6 to fund, or to make a call for, what is called the Eurocan programme which was intended to look at these barriers and to try to identify ways to bypass them. That programme or project prioritised the formation of the establishment of a network, of a platform for translational research, where you link centres and share expertise and have common projects and at the same time proposed the creation of an internet.
What about the sustainability of these types of projects?
When we decided to apply to this EurocanPlatform project we realised that we were getting into a five year programme and funding yet we knew that if we were going to do that realistically this would take a long time. So it was clear that if the Innovation Union, which is the strategy of Europe for growth, was a priority then we needed to translate discoveries into applications. Then, of course, we had a look at how you move a discovery across the innovation cycle and that takes many years. So we thought at that time that even though we could plan our work using this variable geometry, so we use the best themes in every country to join them, but that wouldn’t in the long run solve the problem. You would be able to do things but after five years you would be back with no funding again and then, of course, everybody will desegregate and every individual will look for grants whether it’s in the same topic or other topics because that’s the way the academic system works – you have to get your grant, you have to get your work, you have to get postdocs and that requires publications. So we decided that we should not only look at the short term but spend time with how we could have life after the five years. At that time there were many instruments that allowed you to collaborate across borders but none of them gave you sustainability so we needed to identify how can we have an input on changing the system.
So one of our ideas was by joining with ECCO to become part of this European Partnership Action Against Cancer which asked us to coordinate one set of all cancer research in Europe by 2013. Of course this was a very ambitious goal but on the other hand it gave us, for the first time, the opportunity to sit with funders, member states. Then the idea was to try to put the scientific community in between the member states and the Commission so they could feed information, find priority areas that are also priority areas in the member states and then try to get the cross border collaboration help by the European Union. So that, I think, is the first time that we’d been more or less accepted to be part of that and the impact has been quite good into at least getting some of the member states to take the lead on some of these ideas and to try to identify mechanisms where if you really have a big problem how you can get people to collaborate, team up, and get the best that you can that you cannot really do at the national level. So that was one of the ideas.
The other idea was we needed to have the scientific community involved in providing evidence to write policy. That again is something that we sought through ECCO to partner with other disease organisations. So we joined the European BioMed Alliance which has 250,000 or so professionals from cancer, diabetes. We agreed to work on a common goal, which is to try to get the scientific community to have a say and try to get an involvement in deriving policy. So that is why we thought about the idea of… ideally it would be very nice to have a European Institute of Health but of course it’s a big thing.
The BioMed Alliance with this large number of researchers and clinicians going through all the disease continuum gave us the opportunity to try to speak with a single voice in matters that cut across diseases. Of course, one of them is to try to work for having more funds for health research because everybody would like to go in that direction, of course in times like this with economic problems it’s not that easy. But the other thing was can we really have a say on the priorities, can we really be part or provide an evidence base so policy makers can make decisions that then would be good for everybody? To go into that direction we thought we should have something like a European council for health research, similar to the European Research Council. The European Research Council is the bottom up, demand driven funding instrument but we thought that this should be a bit more complex than that because you have the problem of the innovation, you really have to move things into discoveries.
Soon we found out, as we knew, that the time was not right because the Horizon 2020 was already at the very end of preparation. So we tried to push in this idea of having a scientific steering board which would be, anyway, a core for a European council for health research. This steering board, scientifically led, could actually help the Commission to derive priorities, work with the programme committees, help them to network with all the stakeholders when you go into consultations for priorities or whatever, and that could be the industry, it could be the scientific community, anybody who has anything to say on this disease. Then at the same time try to use the experience we had been gathering concerning the impact, the coordination, to try to put this idea of a forum where you could sit funders, member states or charities or any with scientists and try to match their priorities. Then try to have that close to the Commission and what Horizon 2020 could be because there are many projects that would not be able to be done because only 3% of cancer research is being given by the Commission, 3.5%; 96.5% remains in the member states or charities or other. So the question is that we need to really get these funders’ interest on how to achieve bigger goals, more ambitious goals, by having some sort of forum where if you have a problem you can go there and it will really work then you can implement it. There is no obligation; the question is how can we really make use of the resources that we have in the way that we benefit society at large.
Do you think Horizon 2020 is a step in the right direction?
Yes, I think still we have to see what the annual programmes will be. The priorities are there, most of the priorities, the big lines, everybody would agree that there’s other things to do. But we still need to see how that is going to be coherent into calls that go across diseases or we don’t really… that has not been decided yet because you still have to have the input from the programme committees which the Commission would look, you have this board, or these panels, which would look into that and then something will come out which is translated into an annual work programme.
But nevertheless these framework programmes are the only instruments that we have to work at the community level. So we need to really make all the efforts to make sure that whatever the member states do they are coherent with what the EU would like to and what the scientific community would like to so you really get a more competitive Europe where perhaps most of our young people would like to develop their capability instead of moving to the United States or other places. The problem is Europe is not a federated state; health is not a competence of the union while research is a competence. Then we have diseases like cancer that go all the way from discovery to treatment and care. So that means we have the whole spectrum yet there is a gap. So we as a community, we would like to work in trying to get health ministries to work with research ministries, research with so that we can advance what the patients really demand which are better treatments and improved quality of life.
