A Horizon Europe draft work programme sheds more light on Widening 2.0, the European Commission’s strategy to help countries reform their R&D systems, attract talent and use structural funds for targeted research projects.

The Commission officially launched Horizon Europe on Tuesday, but it won’t publish the final work programmes and first funding calls until April. A draft work programme circulating online, dated October 2020 could see some change in the meantime, but chances are the main funding directions will remain the same.

Drafts posted on the websites of research associations, universities and consultancies give member states enough detail to get ready to tap into the new widening programme, designed to help them plug the west – east research and innovation performance gap.

In 2019, EU research ministers agreed to ring fence 3.3 per cent of the €95.5 billion Horizon Europe budget for Widening, a move seen as a big victory for MEPs and countries behind a long-running push to create a more level playing field in the EU’s research programme.

With the notable exception of Estonia, EU data indicates R&D performance is below the EU average in all member states that joined the bloc after 2004. The Commission hopes reinforcing Widening helps them catch up. Achieving this requires the Commission to coordinate with national governments on national R&D budgets, and on measures to retain home grown talent by increasing salaries and improving working conditions.

In a break with the past, member states are now allowed to spend up to five per cent of structural fund money on research and innovation projects that meet Horizon Europe standards, but which fail to win grants because of the high level of competition. At the same time, state aid rules are to be relaxed, allowing member states to use structural funds to fund science-based start-ups.

Reforming EU research and innovation

The Commission has allocated a significant part of the draft work programme to projects that promote reform of national R&D systems, aligning them with EU policy objectives.  It wants member states to use money from Widening to set up multiannual joint calls funding collaborative R&I projects.

In addition, Widening will support joint projects to translate research to the market and encourage adoption.

Research organisations in Widening countries can get funding for initiatives to help research management staff gain greater understanding of EU networking and mobility schemes for researchers.

A “hop-on” scheme will back efforts to help institutions in countries with weak research systems take part in Horizon Europe collaborative research projects. The scheme will be introduced in the first calls in April, but won’t be fully implemented until 2023, once the Commission gathers proof from the first projects that research institutions are able to host additional partners.

European Research Area

EU research commissioner Mariya Gabriel has long been advocating for a revamp of the European Research Area (ERA), a strategy to create a single market for research and innovation, that was never fully implemented and has had a limited impact on EU’s R&D performance.

The October draft of the work programme says Horizon Europe will fund projects that help universities to attract and retain talent, reducing brain drain from member states with weak research systems.

The Commission also wants to establish a framework for research careers and a common academic career structure, that promotes widespread recognition of the competences that PhD students and postdocs in various stages of their careers have obtained, both within and outside academia, and regardless of sector, discipline or location.

Building trust in science

The Widening draft work programme also details research calls aimed at reducing mistrust in science and experts. The coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis have resurfaced entrenched attitudes towards scientific breakthroughs in vaccination and mitigating climate change. The aim is to come up with recommendations for governments to open the way for funding agencies, research institutes and universities to tackle this mistrust in science, research and innovation.

“Societal confidence in the research system and in its outcomes is vital to ensuring the EU’s contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals and achieving the European Green Deal targets, for the uptake of innovation in society, and for continued public investment in R&I,” the draft work programme says.

The European Court of Auditors is assessing if measures in Horizon Europe to reduce the east-west innovation gap have had any impact, with a report expected by the end of the year on the Widening programme.

Over the past seven years, the EU has invested €1 billion in Widening, to help member states improve weak R&D systems through funding capacity building, and creating international links between leading research institutions and low-performing regions. As part of the programme, the Commission allocated €43 billion (in 2014 prices) from structural funds to research and innovation.

But many Widening countries report hurdles to participation, and low success rates have dampened expectations.

“I think that the Romanian institutions have applied, but, indeed, the application rate was low and the success rate was also low,” Daniel David, rector of the Babeș-Bolyai University in Romania, told Science|Business.

Similarly, Lithuania has only one ERA chair, an outstanding EU-funded researcher whose brief is to help the country’s institutions to attract and retain high quality researchers. In the EU Twinning programme, designed to support transnational relationships between institutions, Lithuania did not win its first grant until the last call in Horizon 2020. Meanwhile, in the Teaming pillar, which finances the creation or updating existing centres of excellence, the country received funding to develop a business plan for a research centre, but has not received support to implement it.

“Lithuania did not take full advantage of the programme,” said Brigita Serafinavičiūtė, head of the Lithuania RDI Liaison Office in Brussels.

Looking at the core components of Widening, David identifies five issues, starting with weak dissemination and difficulty understanding the different mechanisms of the programme. When it came to funding, many participants had trouble securing matching funding from other sources, such as national and EU structural funds.

Universities found it particularly difficult to engage in the projects, many of which require a business plan and a commercial outlook. “Our legislation is not encouraging commercial activities for public universities, despite the fact that, on paper, in theory, the third university mission [of] socio-economic impact, is supported,” said David. “Because of such ambiguous legislation, the universities are very cautions to be engaged in large projects.”

A key issue appears to be the general lack of public investment in university research in Romania, where most funding goes to research institutes independent from universities. As a consequence, David says, universities are cautious about entering big European projects demanding excellence and sustainability.

Some of the institutions in Widening also had a hard time convincing western counterparts to participate in the programme, as they did not see the €1 billion funding as worth their time. In the end, Serafinavičiūtė says, the programme “reinforced the links with existing partners, but I doubt many new networks were formed.”

Slow and uneven

Despite the Widening programme, since 2012 the innovation gap has barely narrowed and remains far larger than the gap for most other economic indicators, such as GDP per capita. An interim Commission report on the effectiveness of Widening found progress is slow and uneven, with little change in the newest member states.

In the face of this, funding for Widening in Horizon Europe will almost triple, with 3.3%, or €2.8 billion (in 2018 prices), of the overall budget dedicated to closing the gap. Starting in 2023, there will also be a new “hop-on” programme allowing research institutions in Widening countries to join Horizon Europe collaborative research projects.

But Serafinavičiūtė said it will take more than this to address the imbalance. “Doubling the funding is not a key solution that will change everything. We need to think more holistically about what measures we need to take.”

For one, she says, if Horizon Europe is intended to address societal problems, excellence should not be the only measure by which projects are assessed. Challenges exist everywhere and often require local measures to deal with them.

“The question is what we are hoping to achieve with this programme,” said Serafinavičiūtė. “If we want more countries to participate, we have to admit that excellence should not be the only criterion.”

The EU auditors will take the changes in Horizon Europe into account in their evaluation of the EU Widening efforts in Horizon 2020, looking at the likely impact on research excellence imbalances in this decade.

Meanwhile, the EU must also maintain other programmes that aim to bring more geographical balance to the research ecosystem. David says Romania has had more success in the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) programme, another scheme encouraging cross-border networking.

And waiting for help is not enough. Widening counties should roll up their sleeves and do their homework, believes Serafinavičiūtė. “We can’t expect the EU15 to drag us along with them, and why should they? Who wants new competition?”

The EU on Wednesday set out a €4 billion Beating Cancer plan, including the most concerted push ever for research and its translation through to better treatments.

The plan, an all-hands-on-deck effort across the commission with a focus on 10 top line priorities, will fund technology development, create new research networks, improve access to therapies, promote disease prevention and early detection and offer better support for people who survive cancer.

Repurposing medicines to fight cancer and developing new artificial intelligence (AI) applications to detect tumours faster also make the list, as does a broader push to increase skills, among other recommendations. Underpinning the whole is a focus on greater data sharing and collaboration.

One of the first actions, the European Cancer Imaging Initiative in 2022 will compile a tumour atlas of anonymised cancer scans that can be used by researchers and hospitals to train diagnostic AI tools, improving their accuracy and reliability.

“Early detection saves lives. We need to screen more and screen better. This means adopting better technology,” EU health chief Stella Kyriakides said.

Supporting this, a new Knowledge Centre on Cancer will be launched this year within the Joint Research Centre, the EU’s in-house science service, to help coordinate scientific and technical cancer-related initiatives. The centre brief is to act as a ‘knowledge broker’, issuing guidelines to inform the design and rollout of the plan.  

Later this year the Innovative Medicines Initiative, the EU’s public private partnership in medical research, will launch projects on the use of AI to support health workers, carers and patients in prevention, diagnosis and treatment, and projects on overcoming cancer drug resistance.

Meanwhile, the European Health Data Space, set to be up and running by 2025, will “enable cancer patients to securely access and share their health data between healthcare providers and across borders in the EU.”

Europe accounts for a tenth of the global population, but a quarter of the world’s cancer cases. It is not one disease but essentially hundreds. It is the second biggest killer after cardiovascular disease, but by 2035, cases are set to increase by almost 25%, making it the leading cause of death. There is also increasing concern about the economic costs of cancer, which have risen to more than €100 billion a year across the EU.

There are huge disparities in access to cancer services across the EU, with a recent Eurostat study showing that in one member state, 82% of women aged 50-69 had a mammogram within the last two years, while in another the figure stands at 0.2%.

A cancer inequality registry will be set up by 2022 to help member states identify problem areas and where to direct support, Kyriakides said.

Currently the COVID-19 pandemic is the number one health priority in Europe. But over one million people died of cancer on the continent last year, roughly twice the COVID-19 death rate. The pandemic has severely affected cancer care, disrupting treatment, delaying diagnosis, and affecting access to medicines. “This in itself is very worrying,” said Kyriakides.

Cancer moonshot

At the centre of the EU’s cancer plan is a large and targeted programme of research – or moonshot – to inject more urgency into the development of more effective cancer therapies.

The EU Mission on Cancer, part of the €95.5 billion Horizon Europe science programme, will be the main budget line for research, investing up to €2 billion over the next seven years.

The effort draws inspiration from the US Cancer Moonshot. In 2016, 45 years after Richard Nixon’s “war on cancer”, President Barack Obama announced the moonshot, with the then vice president Joe Biden at its head.

The Trump administration chose not to continue the federal Moonshot programme, but funding continued, with the initiative injecting $1.8 billion into an orchestrated programme of research that has the aim of achieving in five years what would otherwise have taken a decade. Some researchers are already eyeing up a successor programme.

On top of the mission funding, research money in the Beating Cancer plan will flow through several other pots, including the expanded EU health programme, called EU4Health, and the Digital Europe programme.

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the Horizon Europe programme that provides grants for work and research placements, will continue developing cancer researchers’ skills.

The Digital Europe programme will offer up to €250 million for cancer-related digital projects. Meanwhile, funding from the EU4Health programme will go towards the development of an app that tells people how to reduce their cancer risks.

There will also be special grants under the Euratom nuclear research programme for research to improve radiotherapy.

Member states will be encouraged to spend EU regional funds on cancer services, for instance on mobile healthcare units for cancer screening, or new laboratory diagnostics. “This is particularly important for those living in the most deprived and isolated communities with restricted access to large urban centres,” the plan says.

Calculating how much the EU normally already spends on cancer research is complicated, because so much expenditure is tucked into so many budgets. The Commission says that, under Horizon 2020, it awarded over €1 billion in cancer research grants for roughly 1,000 cancer-related research projects from 2014 – 2020.

More data, more sharing

Among other initiatives in the plan, the Commission pledges a big drive to repurpose approved drugs. “Building on experiences with repurposing of medicines to treat COVID-19, an additional project will be launched that uses high-performance computing to rapidly test existing molecules and new drug combinations,” the plan says.

Towards the end of the year, the Commission will announce the ‘Cancer Diagnostic and Treatment for All’ initiative, which will drive investment into next generation sequencing of tumour cells, a field that is both rapidly advancing cancer research and supporting the use of therapies targeted at particular genetic defects.

Getting the National Comprehensive Cancer Centres in every member country to work more closely together is a key part of the plan. “We need to bring all of this together,” Kyriakides said. Many believe a stumbling block to advances in cancer research may be poor collaboration among researchers.

The Commission promises a network, pegged for 2025, to better link the 27 national centres. Officials say this will look something like the European Reference Networks, which were set up in 2017 allow clinicians to pool their knowledge of rare diseases.

Also foreseen is the European Initiative to Understand Cancer – a broad research effort that will look at how cancers develop, and help identify individuals at high risk.

The existing European Cancer Information System, which monitors the cancer burden in Europe, will be expanded in 2021 to include new indicators, and a new section on childhood cancers.

Looking after cancer survivors

Another offshoot of the Beating Cancer plan will provide resources to improve life for cancer survivors.

By 2022, a ‘Cancer Survivor Smart-Card’ will be available for patients to summarise their clinical history and aid follow-up care. This personalised and voluntary system, which could in fact be an app, will connect the patient directly with doctors, the Commission said.

It will come alongside a new ‘European Cancer Patient Digital Centre’, to be created under the cancer mission that will foster the voluntary exchange of patient data. The added objective of these initiatives is to collect a wider pool of data for researchers.

The Commission will also use the plan to set public health targets, such as getting tobacco use down by 20 per cent in the EU by 2040, and harmful drinking to drop 10 per cent in the same period.

Cigarette smoking and other forms of tobacco use is responsible for 15-20% of all European cancer cases, making this the top avoidable risk factor, an EU policy document said. The continent has the highest levels of alcohol consumption in the world, meaning alcohol-attributable cancer is also high.

The EU will also spend money on healthy diet promotion, and require member states to put new warning labels on alcohol.