The European Union has invested heavily in health research. Since the early 2000’s it supported the creation of European Research Infrastructures (pan-European organisations devoted to health research) like BBMRI, EATRIS, ECRIN, ELIXIR, and funded the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), the world’s largest public private partnership (PPP) in health. The combination of PPPs such as the IMI and European infrastructures has contributed significantly to the boosting of Europe’s translational research power – turning science in to new treatments. The next step for Europe is to bring these two success stories in health research closer and design a new path together, to enable European researchers to make more and more new treatments available to patients.
