We are delighted to announce that the H2020-INFRADEV-3 proposal submitted by EATRIS in March 2019 to support the infrastructure’s further development in the field of personalised medicine, EATRIS-Plus, has been granted by the European Commission.
The project is expected to start early 2020 and will last for four years. The consortium is composed of 19 partners including all current national nodes of the infrastructure, academic representatives of prospective member countries, as well as external umbrella organisations representing the patients’ voice (the European Patients Forum) or biotech companies (Biocat).
EATRIS-Plus will provide additional support for EATRIS long-term sustainability
The project aims to build further capabilities and deliver innovative scientific tools to support the long-term sustainability of EATRIS as one of Europe’s key research infrastructures for personalised medicine.
In the first five years of operations, EATRIS has shown strong proof of concept of the value and utility of the services portfolio, with users including academia, SMEs, large pharma, biotech and research funding organisations. The overarching aim of EATRIS-Plus is to further support the long-term sustainability of EATRIS by delivering innovative scientific tools to the research community, strengthening the infrastructure’s financial model and reinforcing EATRIS leadership in the European Research Area (ERA), particularly in the field of Personalised Medicine research and development.
Specific objectives include:
- Consolidate EATRIS capacities in the field of Personalised Medicine to better serve academia and industry and augment the number of EATRIS Innovation Hubs with large pharma;
- Further strengthen the long-term sustainability of the EATRIS financial model;
- Drive patient empowerment through active involvement in the infrastructure’s operations; and
- Expand strategic partnerships with research infrastructures and other relevant stakeholders.
The proposal relies on a scientific and technological programme combined with capacity-building activities across 16 EU countries, with the support of two umbrella organisations representing patient organisations and SMEs.
Pooling of EATRIS’ omics technologies will better address global challenges of Personalised Medicine
EATRIS-Plus will help pooling and exploiting the translational academic capacities of the infrastructure in omics technologies to enable researchers to better address the scientific and societal challenges of Personalised Medicine. A key output of the project will be the piloting and delivery of a multi-omic toolbox, that will include SOPs, guidelines for best practices, reference materials, quality parameters, analysis tools, criteria for establishing reference values, and will provide access to a repository of multi-omic data. Additionally, the coordination office and 13 existing national nodes of the infrastructure will participate in implementing joint outreach, training, industry engagement and international collaboration activities to further build national capacity, increase users’ trust and strengthen EATRIS and the ERA global scientific leadership in the areas of translational research and Personalised Medicine.
Further information on the project will be communicated towards the end of 2019.
If you want to learn more about this project, then feel free to get in touch with the project coordinator, Dr. Toni Andreu: toniandreu@eatris.eu.
