The persisting R&I gap between Western and Eastern Europe is a major challenge to the EU. It includes under-developed R&I ecosystems, a lower ability to attract and retain talents, single-track research careers with a lack of modern HR, and fragmented industry-academia collaboration. To improve the situation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), Alliance for Life Sciences (Alliance4Life) was formed by 12 progressive health research institutions and universities in 11 CEE countries. Since 2018 it has become a lively community and role model of modern institutional governance and excellent research in CEE, piloted strategic institutional reforms, and succeeded in influencing national R&I reforms and EU policy. With the A4L_BRIDGE project, the alliance focuses on a broader implementation of the successfully piloted strategic changes toward enhanced attractiveness, competitiveness, and innovation strength, and newly also addresses excellence in higher education. The scientific collaboration will be boosted by a Virtual Research Centre, connecting different research groups, and thanks to seed funding, initial research projects with IP originating in CEE will be prepared to be developed into RIA projects for Horizon Europe. The alliance will develop a complex educational matrix, including mentoring, e-learning, and international internships, targeting both academic and non-academic staff in all career stages. The Industry Relationship Platform will stimulate knowledge transfer and partaking in applied research projects. Societal actors will be invited to shape the research agendas and will be addressed at events for end users of health research results. Events, webinars, and dissemination activities will target national stakeholders and policymakers, promoting ERA values and supporting the empowering of low-performing regions in their R&I upscale. The A4L_BRIDGE project will thus significantly contribute to bridging the gap in R&I performance in the EU.

Excellent EU programs push health R&I but are not sufficient. Synergy with strategic initiatives in MS and a new model for impactful collaborations are needed to address the challenges for health. ERA4Health brings the opportunity to increase EU transnational collaborative research funding by creating a funding body for joint programming in priority areas addressing EU Public Health Needs, with total duration of 7 years. ERA4Health focuses on tackling diseases and reducing disease burden and the following challenges: 1) the increasing demand for a better quality of life and a better care of patients, 2) the need to transform public health care systems in more effective, efficient, equitable, accessible, and resilient ones and 3) the need to strengthen disease prevention and health promotion. In this view, ERA4Health objectives are: .SO1- Support relevant medical research including clinical fields and intervention areas (prevention, diagnosis, treatment) .SO2- Improve the utilisation of existing health technologies in clinical practice .SO3- Build capacity, in particular in conducting Investigator Initiated Clinical Studies at EU scale .SO4- Implement and advance the practice of RRI across the breadth of the programme ERA4Heatlth will be implemented in 2 phases: . Phase 1 (2 years) will implement joint calls focused on nutrition and lifestyle-related diseases, cardiovascular diseases and nanomedicine (4 in two years). In parallel, it will establish a supporting framework to overcome the challenges in launching international IICSs joint calls. . Phase 2, if the EC approves it: additional multinational calls for IICSs and joint calls for other priority areas will be launched in accordance with the decision of the Health Programme Committee taken at the end of previous Phase 34 partners (20 from EU, 3 Third Countries associated to HE and 2 non-associated, non EU), will commit 90,510,000€, during the 3 first years, as financial support to third parties.

The 15-month coordination and support action “4.UNCAN.eu” will generate a strategic agenda to launch UNCAN.eu, a European initiative to UNderstand CANcer proposed by the Mission Board and the European Beating Cancer Plan. This research agenda will be built with the final aim of achieving a new breakthrough in cancer prevention and treatment that will contribute to saving European citizens’ lives and help ensuring an optimal quality of life to disease survivors. To reach a new level of understanding, UNCAN.eu will take advantage of recent advances in research data generation and data sciences. Reliable, high-quality cancer research data generated by experimental model analysis and collected from longitudinal follow-up of cancer patients will be shared and integrated at an unprecedented scale within a Federated Cancer Research data hub, in the context of the General Data Protection Regulation. This information will be used by relevant players in Europe and beyond to address urgent and essential scientific and medical challenges in cancer prevention, early diagnosis, treatment and survivorship, in males and females of various ages. These challenges, identified in close interaction with European patients and citizens, will be tackled through competitive, ambitious and innovative, cross-border and trans-disciplinary research programmes built in a problem-solving manner. The definition of challenges will integrate inequalities in cancer research across regions and member states in order to boost the research potential of less-developed regions in Europe. Players will be committed to open science principles, including FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) guiding principles for scientific data collection, management and stewardship. The new understanding gained from the collection and analysis of this wealth of data will apply secondarily to other diseases.