Sustained collaboration of national and regional cancer funders to support the Cancer Mission through translational research

The successful proposal should aim to deliver results that are directed and tailored towards and contribute to all the following expected outcomes:

• National and regional cancer funders across Europe (i.e. representing Northern, Southern, Central, Eastern and Western Europe), based on a common strategic research and innovation agenda, deliver:

1. At least four transnational calls for proposals addressing translational cancer research, resulting in collaborative grants to academic investigator-led third parties;

2. Streamlined national, regional and foundation-based or charity-based practices in organising peer-reviewed translational cancer research and innovation funding between the partners, with attention to exploring novel funding schemes and initiatives as well as sustainability of a network of funders where appropriate;

Common challenges in translational cancer research require effective transnational cooperation on prioritised efforts, leveraging national, regional and charity-based resources and appropriate funding schemes. Important achievements of translational cancer research funding by long-term collaboration of national and philanthropy funding organisations have been obtained by the TRANSCAN network under the Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2007-2013) and Horizon 2020 (2014-2020)^[1].

More efforts are warranted to address the potential for sustainable coordination, the access to and sharing of research data to enhance the understanding of cancer as well as to further the alignment of national, regional and foundation or charity-based cancer research and innovation programmes and activities in Member States and Associated Countries. The EU contribution will not be used to co-fund the grants to third parties described hereunder.

The proposal should address all the following:

• Align, coordinate and support efforts from and between national and regional public and private research funding programmes on translational cancer research to issue at least four joint transnational calls which are integrated with the Cancer Mission and the Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan;
• Pool the necessary financial resources from the participating national and regional research programmes as well as, where appropriate, leverage resources from pertinent foundations, charities and transnational initiatives, to support at least four joint transnational calls for proposals which are integrated with the Cancer Mission and the Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan, while avoiding overlaps with EU-funded research under Horizon Europe;
• Demonstrate the potential impact of collaboration between national and regional transnational research and innovation programmes, as well as demonstrate a leverage effect on European and national research and competitiveness using key indicators;
• Consider novel funding schemes and joint activities such as analyses of research and innovation funding programmes, impact, dissemination, citizen (including cancer patients), engagement, and training;
• Datasets produced by collaborative grants to academic investigator-led third parties should be made FAIR whenever possible, while tools and models should follow the principles of open science, taking advantage of current European research infrastructures and supporting the future UNCAN.eu research data platform.

This action supports the follow-up to the July 2023 Communication on EU Missions assessment^[2].

[1] https://transcan.eu/

[2] eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52023DC0457