Joint transnational call 2019 for proposals on Personalised Medicine through the ERA-NET: ERA PerMed

The French National Research Agency, in partnership with 22 countries is launching the second joint transnational call for proposals on “Personalised Medicine: Multidisciplinary Research towards Implementation” through the ERA-NET ERA PerMed. This represents the first of three potential additional calls not co-funded by the European Commission.

The overall objectives of the ERA PerMed call are:

• To support translational research projects in the field of Personalised Medicine (PM);
• To encourage and enable interdisciplinary collaborations towards implementation of PM by 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, healthcare settings and other healthcare organisations) and private partners e.g. SMEs (small and medium-sizes enterprises).

This call for proposals includes 31 research funding organisations from the further 22 countries and regions: Austria, Belgium, Canada (Quebec), Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany (Saxon), Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy (Lombardy, Tuscany), Latvia, Luxemburg, Norway, Poland, Romania, Spain (Catalonia, Navarre), Sweden and Turkey. The available budget for this call is 30 million Euro approx.

Scope of the Call

Proposals must be interdisciplinary and clearly demonstrate the potential impact on Personalised Medicine as well as the added value of transnational collaboration.

The ERA PerMed JTC2019 comprises three Research Areas:

Each project proposal must address at least one module of Research Area 3 and at least one module of Research Area 1 or 2. The coherent integration and combination of the different Research Areas and Modules in the proposals will be part of the evaluation process.

Consortium composition

Joint research proposals may be submitted by applicants belonging to one of the following categories, if eligible according to relevant regional/national funding organisations’ regulations for research funding:

• A.    Academia or research institutes;
• B.    Clinical/public health sector;
• C.    (Industry) Private partners, e.g. SMEs.

Only transnational projects will be funded. Each consortium submitting a proposal must involve at least three partners eligible for funding coming from three different countries whose funders participate to the call. All three legal entities must be independent of each other. The maximum number of partners per project is six although no more than 2 eligible partners from the same country participating in the call will be accepted in one consortium (including those partners with own funding).

Partners not eligible to be funded (e.g. from non-funding countries or not fundable according to regional/national regulations of the participating funding organisation) may participate in transnational projects if they are able to secure their own funding. They are considered as full partners and have to be integrated in the pre- and full-proposal templates as such. No more than one partner with its own funding is allowed in consortia with at least three partners eligible for funding. The coordinator must be eligible to be funded by the participating funding organisations to this call.

At the full-proposal stage, a consortium may be expanded to up to seven partners in total only by inclusion of a partner from an underrepresented country. A list of underrepresented countries will be provided to coordinators invited to submit full-proposals.

Funding will be awarded for a maximum of three years. ANR will exclusively fund French partners of the selected projects.