More financial means needed to fund excellence research Interview with Dame Janet THORNTON, Vice-President of the European Research Council in charge of life sciences until the end of 2020 to a group of 2-4 researchers who join forces to tackle very ambitious research problems.
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© Jeff Dowling, EMBL-EBI
ould you remind us of the ERC's mission and key figures? The ERC is granting funding to researchers on the sole criterion of scientific excellence in order to encourage investigator-driven research across all fields. Our funding schemes are open to junior and senior researchers alike working in Europe. What is more, the ERC’s excellence-driven selection process supports bottom-up research projects: researchers devise their own projects instead of being imposed research topics for political reasons. This is key to their progress and the promotion of new, promising areas of research. I am proud to say that ERC is a genuine success story in Europe. Since 2007 (the year of its foundation), its budget has gone up to some 13 billion euros. About 10 000 grants have been awarded so far, giving rise to 7 Nobel Prizes and 150 000 scientific publications. Each grantee received a grant for up to five years of on average 1.4 million euros for early-career researchers and around 2.3 million euros for the senior ones.
Could you give us some examples of health projects funded by the ERC? Even before the pandemic of COVID-19, the ERC supported researchers working on coronaviruses who in some cases decided to change the direction of their research to focus on COVID research when the pandemic broke out. This bottom-up, curiosity-driven research proved vital; indeed no less than some 180 ERC grantees are addressing the pandemic very usefully from different disciplinary angles.
But let me give you three precise examples of ERCbacked projects related to health. Dame Linda Partridge is working in the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, Germany. Older individuals often experience multiple diseases (now including COVID-19), so she is striving to better understand the basis of ageing in order to improve the health of the elderly. For her part, Nabila Bouatia-Naji, based at Inserm, France, is researching two cardiovascular diseases affecting young women: fibromuscular dysplasia and spontaneous coronary artery dissection. She is carrying out the genetic analysis of the muscle cells around diseased arteries and has already identified two genes associated with these two diseases. Lastly, Malin Palmar from the University of Lund is studying genetic reprogramming to help treat neurodegenerative diseases, some of which are characterised by the death of brain cells responsible for producing dopamine. It might be possible to reprogramme glial cells to replace damaged cells and restore function. This brain repair research has great promise for future therapeutics.
The grants help each grantee to recruit researchers and other staff - often between 6 and 10 - in order to set up a dedicated research team. Therefore, more than 70 000 team members, including many post-doc researchers, were supported through the grants.
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Could you tell us about ERC’s different funding mechanisms? Each year, the ERC supports about 1 000 projects. It offers three core grants which cover the three different stages of researchers’ academic careers: the Starting Grant for younger researchers from 2 to 7 years after the PhD, the Consolidator Grant from 7 to 12 years after the PhD, and the Advanced Grant for researchers showing significant achievements over the last ten years. Furthermore, the ERC offers the Proof of Concept Grant for ERC grantees wishing to check the innovation potential of their research results, as well as the newer funding, the Synergy Grant, which is devoted
The lab of ERC grantee Marlyn Parmar who is studying genetic reprogramming to help treat neurodegenerative diseases
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What do you think are the main challenges ahead for the ERC? Our first challenge is the insufficient amount of money to fund all excellence research. The funding rate amounts to a mere 10 to 13%, which is a serious problem. The demand is so much higher. Although EU leaders recently agreed to a certain increase of the ERC budget for 2021-2027, it will not be quite as much as we, the scientific community and others, had hoped for. This means that many applications will not be funded, which is very disappointing in the context of the pandemic where scientific research and innovation should receive increased support. And other societal challenges are looming: ageing-related health problems, climate change and its impact on living systems, biodiversity but also genetic engineering, social sciences (and in particular the impact of COVID-19-induced lockdowns on mental health and the economy), antibiotic resistance (and the need for discovery of new antibiotics), as well as the anticipation of future pandemics. All these challenges require new ideas and that is why we need scientists so much.
