In March 2000, the European Union stated the ambitious goal of becoming the most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy in the world, by 2010. To achieve it, the EU has gone through several reforms as well as strong investments in research and development. Although the European economy had to face a dramatic economic downturn in late 2000s, research and innovation kept its central role in boosting EU’s competitiveness, exports and the capacity to
develop new technologies. The framework programme for research and innovation, Horizon 2020, involved more than 45,000 researchers and funded 18,000 projects, supporting discoveries that should improve people’s quality of life.
At the high-level conference on research and innovation on November 27 th , the European Parliament and the European Commission presented some of Europe’s success stories in research in various fields. European research benefited many sectors such as medicine, pharmaceuticals, food safety, the environment, energy, combating ageing, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence, transport, space, defence, security and cybersecurity. Especially in health and medicine, the EU is contributing to prevent and treat many conditions.
However, the competition in research is running fast, for example in USA and Japan, but most of all in China. Therefore, the European Commission proposed to increase the budget for the next research programme, Horizon Europe, to almost 100 billion Euro; the Parliament is calling for an even more ambitious approach with a budget of 120 billion.
At EFA, we believe investment in health-related research is crucial to relievef the burden of people with chronic diseases, such as asthma, allergy and COPD, and we hope that the new programme will allocate enough resources and promote the involvement of the patients for better and more innovative results.
Find more information about the conference here.