A life support: EU health funding
With cuts to national research budgets, scientists across Europe are becoming more dependent on supranational funding. According to the Cork Cancer Research Centre, EU funding is now considered ‘vital’ to the development of new vaccines and medical procedures. Furthermore, investment in research training schemes, for example the Marie Curie Actions, is now also important in assisting the EU in developing a competitive knowledge base on the global stage.
Dr Mark Tangney is the principal investigator of the Cork Cancer Research Centre and provides his thoughts on the role EU funding now plays and how cross-border collaboration will enable Ireland to become more international competitive.
Can you provide some background to your FP7-funded research projects and your work at the Cork Cancer Research Centre?
The primary focus of my group’s work is in cancer from a microbiology perspective. The main projects we have running in the lab involve the use of bacteria as therapeutic agents for cancer. Bacteria have an innate natural ability to grow in and fight tumours due to the unique tumour environment that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the body. Normally, if a bacterial infection occurs in the body, the immune system destroys the bacteria very quickly, but in a tumour, bacteria can replicate and grow to huge numbers. So we are trying to exploit that property to get those bacteria to produce anti-cancer drugs within the tumour because that would mean the issue with all cancer therapy is to restrict the activities of the tumours so that you don’t damage any healthy tissue. All of our focus in recent years from FP7 and other national funding programmes has been focused in this general field.
How important has that funding from the European Union and from FP7 been to your work?
Vital. When we began this type of research, our main source of funding was from national grant funding agencies. Yet as time has progressed, especially since the Celtic Tiger finished, there is a more limited supply of government money for all research disciplines. As a result, there has been a heavy push towards more non-exchequer finance, especially European funding.
The Industrial Development (Science Foundation Ireland) Bill 2012 will enable cross-border scientific funding between Ireland and Northern Ireland. What effect will this change have?
This change will certainly help. As Ireland is a small country, in order to become more internationally competitive, we always try to make better use of collaboration.
On a personal level, Irish researchers across the 32 counties of the island of Ireland tend to work closely together academically, on committees etc. However, on a funding level, we are classed as being from different countries and there is no mechanism for us to share resources or to complement each other’s research expertise. This impedes us from being able to work more closely together and consequently the passing of this new bill will absolutely help us.
How would you describe your relationship of working with the European Commission during FP7?
My relationship has always been quite good. I know that people have often described EU grants as being particularly heavy in red tape and relatively slow and though this is true, I have always found EU funding worthwhile and never considered administration a barrier. I would absolutely applaud the proposals in the next framework programme to decrease the bureaucracy levels and reducing the time to grant funding, which in the past has been a lengthy process.
What aspects of FP7 would you like to see retained under Horizon 2020?
The FP7 People programme is one area where my lab has been successful in obtaining training-related grants and therefore populating my lab with educated staff. Consequently, one of my main hopes is that Horizon 2020 continues the vein of FP7 in terms of supporting scientific training.
I hope Horizon 2020 will increase the level of support for these training initiative grants, i.e. the Marie Curie Actions. The Actions are important in keeping both Ireland and Europe internationally competitive with the rest of the world and are globally recognised. Many of those grants feature an element of co-operation with third countries external to the EU – for example, researchers would spend part of their time in the USA and then return with their experience and expertise to Europe. Similarly, the intra-European exchanges enable a circulation of expertise around different European countries.
To what extent will you be applying for funding under Horizon 2020 and what impact will this have on expanding your scientific research work?
I think all Irish labs will be applying for European funding – it’s almost a mandatory expectation of the science sector. Ireland has always had a relatively good success rate compared with other European countries in the various framework programmes and I know in some countries there is less of a tradition of applying for EU funding, mainly due to the level of administration.
I also hope that there will be a higher level of co-operation grants and closer-to-market grants which will help exploit the transfer of lab work as well as help better fund clinical trials. I think Horizon 2020 also provides a very good vehicle for collaboration within industry – it is very difficult to ‘cold-call’ a company, whereas if you are going under the guise of ‘would you like to join me in applying for a European grant’, the door opens much easier.
I hope that I am not completely shocked when I see the first calls for Horizon 2020 and the European Commission will realise the most beneficial aspects of FP7 and retain these best elements.
Dr Mark Tangney
