EUROTRANS-BIO – a leg up
for Europe’s biotech SMEs
PRINTEUROTRANS-BIO
Europe’s biotechnology sector has an important role to play in developing new
products and services for fields as diverse as health, food, the environment and
energy. Furthermore, with over 2 100 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
employing over 100 000 people, the biotechnology sector also has a high socioeconomic
value. A lot is at stake; the European biotech industry is already lagging
behind its American counterpart and many emerging economies are catching up fast.
The sector’s success depends on its ability to fund and carry out the
research needed to develop new products; this could be rendered
more effective by boosting cooperation within the sector right across
Europe. This would promote the exchange of information and ideas
and reduce a possible duplication of research effort.
One major problem in Europe is that there is currently little coordination
between the national agencies responsible for funding research,
and this is where the EUROTRANS-BIO ERA-NET Action comes in. ERANET
Actions are designed to help national funding agencies coordinate
their activities.
Under the EUROTRANS-BIO banner, nine European regions and countries
(Austria, the Belgian region of Flanders, Finland, France, Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands, the Spanish Basque Country and Spain as a
whole) joined forces to promote transnational biotechnology research
cooperation, particularly among SMEs. Between them, the project
partners cover some 55 to 60 per cent of the EU’s biotech industry.
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The partners include policy makers, agencies and their respective
funding programmes, and they are united by their common goal to
boost the competitiveness of Europe’s biotech industry. Together,
they have succeeded in creating a single, transnational research initiative
which funds joint calls from a ‘virtual’ common pot of
money.
United we stand
‘EUROTRANS-BIO has created a network of ministries and agencies
that efficiently managed to dedicate national or regional funds to
international cooperations through creating commitments to increase
the rate of cross-border R&D partnerships of SMEs in their respective
countries,’ says Project Coordinator, Edith Petitet of the French SME
support organisation, OSEO innovation.
The network is not virtual but concrete, as managers from agencies
in different regions and countries now contact each other as they
would their own colleagues.
At the heart of the project is a virtual common funding pot from which
money is allocated to the selected projects. Within the projects, each
region and country funds its own participants. Under the rules of the
project, each consortium must include at least two SMEs from two
EUROTRANS-BIO member regions or countries. A unique proposal
submission system was set up, in which all the proposals are evaluated
by at least two evaluators of different nationalities helped by
external experts. The recommendations for funding are made at a
final Evaluator Meeting. From the submission to the decision, all the
national funding programmes work hand in hand.
The EUROTRANS-BIO initiative launched its first call for proposals
within 15 months of starting. Three calls for proposals have already
been launched; new calls are announced on the project’s website as
well as on the partners’ own websites, the FP6 website and in the
press. In the two first calls EUROTRANS-BIO received 125 proposals
for innovative industrial research and development projects, signifying
a high level of interest from the SME community. From these calls,
41 projects with a total cost of EUR 77 million were recommended for
funding. The SMEs appreciated the bottom-up approach, the high
levels of interaction between the agencies and the proximity of their
financiers.
Small projects with big ambitions
Projects funded through EUROTRANS-BIO include COLOGENETICS.
This project aims to develop innovative diagnostic tools to improve
the clinical management of colorectal cancer patients by the better
prediction of their clinical outcome and the personalised selection of
the most suitable treatment for them. The project brings together an
SME, a research centre and a research foundation in the Spanish
Basque Country, as well as a German SME, plus three hospitals in the
Spanish Basque Country which will recruit and follow up on the
patients who will participate in the study.
Meanwhile the ETB-DV project, also funded under EUROTRANS-BIO,
brings together Finnish and French partners and is working on third
generation DNA vaccines for pandemic and seasonal flu. The project
covers the whole phase of vaccine development from fundamental
research to preclinical studies.
Though the health sector dominates the EUROTRANS-BIO projects,
other sectors are also represented. For example, the SHORTWHEAT
project is working to develop a semi-dwarf variety of wheat with
improved resistance to Fusarium Head Blight, a fungal disease which
reduces both grain quality and yield in wheat crops. The project partners
include wheat breeders and biotech labs.
Everyone’s a winner
EUROTRANS-BIO fulfils an important role in providing SMEs with a
transnational funding instrument which is designed specifically for
small consortia and understands the needs of SMEs. A further advantage
of collaborative projects such as those funded by the
EUROTRANS-BIO initiative is the fact that risks are shared between
the partners, a factor which is especially important in the high-risk
biotechnology field.
Participating in EUROTRANS-BIO has also had a major impact on the
regional or national agencies and ministries involved. The EUROTRANSBIO
team was delighted that the initiative led to improved
coordination at the regional, national as well as the European level.
Transnational activities coordinating national and regional research
programmes such as EUROTRANS-BIO can lead to reduced risks and
costs, fewer cases of research duplication and stronger international
SME cooperation all over the European Union.