Joint Transnational Call for Proposals (2019) for Personalised Medicine: Multidisciplinary Research towards Implementation

Deadline: Mar 7, 2019  
CALL EXPIRED

1. INTRODUCTION & MOTIVATION

Personalised Medicine (PM) represents a paradigm shift from a “one size fits all” approach to an optimised strategy for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease for each individual person, based on his or her unique characteristics. In this way, PM puts the patient at the very centre of health care, aiming for optimised management of a patient’s disease and/or the predisposition to disease. Recent developments in areas such as diagnostic tests, medical imaging, biosignal monitoring, omics technologies, molecular pathways, lifestyle data, real- time monitoring of conditions and information technology, support this development.

Definition of Personalised Medicine:

ERA PerMed follows the definition stated in the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) of PerMed, adopted from the Horizon2020 advisory group1:
“Personalised Medicine refers to a medical model using characterisation of individuals’ phenotypes and genotypes (e.g. molecular profiling, medical imaging, lifestyle data) for tailoring the right therapeutic strategy for the right person at the right time, and/or to determine the predisposition to disease and/or to deliver timely and targeted prevention.”

Some additional information can be found in the Advice for 2018–2020 of the Horizon 2020 Advisory Group for Societal Challenge 1, “Health, Demographic Change and Well-being”2:
“Different synonymous terms have been used alongside ‘personalised medicine’, most commonly ‘precision medicine’ and ‘stratified medicine’. While there may be subtle differences in the literal meanings of these terms, they usually refer to the same concept when applied in practice. Stratified medicine (mainly used in the UK) is more treatment – dependent, while precision medicine (mostly used in US) has a relatively broad meaning as it refers to 4P (predictive, preventive, personalised and participatory) medicine. We use the term personalised medicine, because the term best reflects the ultimate goal of effectively tailoring treatment based on an individual’s ‘personal profile’, as determined by the individual’s genotype and phenotype data. Based on individuals’ profiles, PM aims to identify the optimal treatment regime by avoiding the treatment-failure approach commonly used in current evidence-based medicine.”

The health systems of the European Union occupy a central part of Europe’s high levels of social protection, and contribute to social cohesion and social justice as well as to sustainable development. The overarching values of universality, access to good quality care, equity, and solidarity have been widely accepted in the work of the different EU institutions.

Current advances in the field of genomics and other omic disciplines, together with the technological progress (such as High Performance Computing), hold the promise to finally bring PM into practice and enable preventive and predictive care models.

Besides the possibility to enhance the lifespan of patients and to increase the quality of clinical practice through more targeted therapies, improvements in PM in the long term may also lead to more efficient use of costs for health systems through early detection, prevention, accurate risk assessment and efficiencies in care delivery.

However, despite recent progress in this field, many challenges remain. The development of PM approaches is complex, interlinked and global in nature and requires truly multidisciplinary, cross-sectoral and transnational collaborations.

ERA PerMed seeks to facilitate these collaborations, and to foster the sharing of ideas, knowledge, data and results between academic researchers from different disciplines (e.g. life sciences, physics, bioinformatics, ethics, economics and health-service research), health care providers, industry/pharma, regulatory authorities as well as health technology assessors.

ERA PerMed3 is an ERA-NET Cofund, supported by 32 partners from 23 countries and cofunded by the European Commission. It aims to align national research strategies and funding activities, promote excellence, reinforce the competitiveness of and at the same time foster cooperation between European players in PM, and enhance European collaboration with non-EU countries.

ERA PerMed is closely linked to the International Consortium for Personalised Medicine (ICPerMed4), established in November 2016. The Action Plan5 of ICPerMed builds on the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) “Shaping Europe's Vision for Personalised Medicine”6 developed by PerMed in 2015. ERA PerMed will foster the implementation of the Action Plan by funding transnational research projects in the field of PM.

The funding organisations listed below have decided to jointly launch the second ERA PerMed Joint Transnational Call (JTC2019) in order to fund international high quality research projects in PM. The Joint Call Secretariat (JCS) will centrally coordinate this call for proposals.

The call is opened and supported simultaneously by the following funding organizations in their respective regions/countries:

• Austrian Science Fund, (FWF), Austria
• Fund for Scientific Research – FNRS, (F.R.S.-FNRS), Belgium
• The Canadian Institutes of Health Research, (CIHR), Canada
• Quebec Health Research Funds (FRQS), Quebec (Canada)
• Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia, (MSE), Croatia Innovation Fund Denmark, (InnoFond), Denmark
• Academy of Scientific Research and Technology, (ASRT), Egypt
• Academy of Finland, (AKA), Finland
• The French National Research Agency, (ANR), France

•   Federal Ministry of Education and Research, (BMBF) / German Aerospace Centre e.V. – Programme Management Agency, (DLR), Germany

•   Federal Ministry of Health, (BMG) / Innovation und Technik GmbH, Programme Management Agency, (VDI/VDE), Germany

•   Saxon State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts, (SMWK), Saxony (Germany)

•   General Secretariat for Research and Technology, (GSRT), Greece

•   National Research, Development and Innovation Office, (NKFIH), Hungary

•   Health Research Board, (HRB), Ireland

•   Ministry of Health, The Chief Scientist Office, (CSO-MOH), Israel

•   Italian Ministry of Health, (IT-MoH), Italy

•   Regional Foundation for Biomedical Research, (FRRB), Lombardy (Italy)

•   Tuscany Region, (TuscReg), Tuscany (Italy)

•   State Education Development Agency, (VIAA), Latvia

•   National Research Fund, (FNR), Luxembourg

•   Research Council of Norway, (RCN), Norway

•   National Centre for Research and Development, (NCBR), Poland

•   Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding, (UEFISCDI), Romania

•   Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial, (CDTI), Spain

•   National Institute of Health Carlos III, (ISCIII), Spain

•   The Scientific Foundation of the Spanish Association Against Cancer, (AECC-FC), Spain

•   Health Department – Generalitat de Catalunya, (DS-CAT), Catalonia (Spain)

•   Government of Navarre, (GN), Navarre (Spain)

•   Swedish Research Council, (SRC), Sweden

•   The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, (TUBITAK), Turkey

2. TIMELINE OF THE CALL

(expected around) May 13th, 2019 Communication of the results of the pre-proposal assessment and invitation for full-proposal stage

Mid/end of August 2019 
Rebuttal stage

January 9th, 2019 Opening of the submission system for pre-proposals

October 2019 Communication of the funding decisions to the applicants

January 9th, 2019  Publication of the call

March 7th, 2019 (17:00, CET) Deadline for pre-proposal submission 

June 17th, 2019 (17:00, CEST) Deadline for full-proposal submission

September 2019 Peer Review Panel meeting and CSC meeting for funding recommendation to national funding agencies

End of 2019, beginning of 2020 Expected project start (also subject to national procedures)

3. AIM OF THE CALL

With its second transnational call (non-cofunded by the EC), ERA PerMed fosters research and innovation activities that build close linkages between basic biomedical research, clinical research, physical sciences and bioengineering, bioinformatics and biostatistics, epidemiology, socio-economic research, as well as research on the integration of PM into clinical practice and on ethical, legal and social implications across the participating countries and beyond. This implies a wide range of multidisciplinary activities brought together by different stakeholders from academia (e.g. universities and research institutions), clinics (e.g. clinical laboratories, medical professionals), industry (e.g. pharmaceutical industry, biotechnology companies, information technology companies including Health Information Technology – HIT), policy makers, regulatory/health technology assessment (HTA) agencies and patients/patient organisations.

The overarching goal is to improve disease management, based on broader and more efficiently elaborated patient stratification, diagnostics and tailored treatment protocols, and disease prevention. The project development should include early involvement of regulatory authorities as well as close interaction with the different key players along the value chain to bridge the gap between first discoveries or inventions until market access. Proposals submitted under this call are expected to demonstrate the applicability of project outcomes to clinical practice. The clinical relevance of the suggested PM approach needs to be convincingly shown. Moreover, proposals are expected to include research on ethical, legal and socio-economic implications, including health economics and regulation, and/or research on optimisation of health care systems.

The overall objectives of the call are:

• -  To support translational research projects in the field of Personalised Medicine;

• -  To encourage and enable interdisciplinary collaborations towards implementation of PM, combining pre-clinical and/or clinical research with bio-informatics components and research on relevant ethical, legal and social aspects and/or research on the optimisation of health care systems;

• -  To encourage collaboration between academia (research teams from universities, higher education institutions, public research institutions), clinical/public health research (research teams from hospital/ public health, health care settings and other health care organisations), private partners e.g. SMEs7 (small and medium-sized enterprises) as well as policy makers, regulatory/HTA agencies and patient organisations.