Byrne backs health collaboration
One of the key objectives under the Societal Challenges pillar is to build ‘longer and healthier lives’ for European citizens. The sector will receive approximately €8bn of funding under Horizon 2020, as well as having access to €254m of financing from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology as it develops a new transnational Knowledge and Innovation Community on ‘innovation for healthy living and active ageing’ from 2014.
The future of medicine and tackling the challenges the sector faces is a key focus for the ‘European Science: Global Challenges & Global Collaboration’ conference in Brussels, where delegates outlined how such difficulties can only now be effectively tackled through international co-operation.
In the presence of the Irish prime minister, Enda Kenny, during the conference conclusions, former European health commissioner David Byrne outlined the importance of multinational collaboration in the health sector.
“Health challenges and their related socioeconomic implications are global and, because of that, the future of medicine can only be efficiently and effectively addressed by applying an international and interdisciplinary scope. We have heard that healthcare systems currently have no proper solutions in place in order to cope with such challenges and countries lack sufficient strategies on how to finance healthcare under these expected developments. Diseases related to ageing will result in increased healthcare costs that have the potential to destabilise the global economy.
“Although the globalisation of travel has been a benefit to society, it has also served as the basis for the transfer of pathogens into new regions of the world.”
The challenges and their solutions to the problems facing the healthcare sector are not limited to the medical industry or national boundaries. According to Byrne, the importance of working together to tackle the challenges ahead cannot be underestimated.
“Today’s most pressing environmental problems, from climate change to the lack of quality in water supplies, will affect health in general. They are of a scale and complexity that goes beyond the reaches of most national resources. The new and global challenges that confront us now require integrated global approaches in order to arrive at new and innovated solutions. These new solutions can only be delivered by ‘top-notch’ research and development. To arrive at these new solutions we must recognise that several paradigm shifts in the research and development of healthcare landscapes are required.
“The ideas that came forward from our discussions were firstly that: we must go from a fragmented research and development landscape to a multidisciplinary and international collaborative research framework. Secondly, we need to take advantage of the massive data century that is available to us. Thirdly, we have to change the focus of research from individual molecules and isolated tissues to complete biological systems. Finally, we must restructure medicine by establishing a well-integrated biological systems-based disease taxonomy.”
Continuing from FP7, Horizon 2020 once again supports wide-ranging public private partnerships (PPPs) as a key form of collaboration between the business and state sectors.
“In order to support this systems-based understanding of diseases, the establishment of a new research framework that integrates and co-ordinates current lead initiatives particularly those that are public private partnerships are vital. Basically, all of the issues highlighted were of global nature and require global collaboration if we want to arrive at efficient and innovative solutions.
“Now is the absolutely appropriate time for international concerted action, ironically because of the downturn in the economies, this is emphasised even more so, so as to develop such solutions that will allow us as a global community to respond to future health challenges and to sustainably finance healthcare systems in the future.
“The problems of facing humans and the health sector are global in nature and therefore international co-operation for resolution. Horizon 2020 has a key international strategy for the participation of non-EU members. We can expect health to use this strategy extensively.”
