A European 'Forum of genome research managers' is established
Experts from the Member States and European Commission services agreed to create a 'Forum of genome research managers' on 8 November. Its mandate will be to develop services between Community programmes and national activities and to help network national programmes. The move comes against the backdrop of a recent number of high-profile discussions on the future for genetics research in Europe.. 'Genomic research is strategically important for Europe as it is expected to unlock considerable economic, medical and social benefits,' says the Commission. 'This has recently been highlighted by the availability of the draft of the human genome sequence. To realise these important goals, major efforts in the rapidly developing field of post-sequence genome research are needed.' The Forum aims to complement activities under a new Commission initiative to create a new type of 'integrated project' for genomic research, as well as to strengthen the support of research infrastructures. In addition, some 100 million euro will be made available in 2001 to fund the reinforcement of research into the ethical implications and societal impact of genomic information. Since 1989, the European Commission has channelled around 300 million euro into genomic research, seeing particularly encouraging results with the yeast, bacillus subtilis and the plant Arabidopsis. Support for this area over the last ten years has had a positive effect in triggering an extraordinary shift in the strategy of many European laboratories, which previously tended to work in isolation at national level,' says the Commission. Under the new initiative, 'integrated projects will aim to stimulate progress in functional genomic relating to human health, by creating projects with critical mass, high impact and high visibility. 'Each project should comprise a minimum of 150 researcher-years', the Commission explains. It will have three components - research, networking, and training and mobility - within an integrated management structure. 'The research component is expected to achieve groundbreaking advances on methods and technologies in functional genomic. The networking component will allow the project to act as a federating force in the field, creating synergy with and between national research efforts [and] the training and mobility component should provide opportunities to train young researchers at Europe's top research centres in the field.' Support for research infrastructures is needed if Europe is to reach its full potential in genome research, adds the Commission. Genome research is currently supported at Community level through the Fifth Framework programme's Quality of Life and management of living resources programme. 'Up to now, the Quality of Life Programme has been able to provide a limited support to such infrastructures, as the...budget... (70 million euro, just 2.9 per cent of the programme budget) had to be spread over all fields of life sciences. The Quality of Life Programme has now strengthened the commitment to infrastructures for the year 2001 by transferring some 25 million euro from the other areas of the Programme.' This money is now earmarked to provide support for infrastructures in the field of genomic for human health, and in particular for genomic and proteomic databases and for repositories of suitable animal models. The Commission will use a new procedure to select integrated projects. This will involve a call for expressions of interest for topics 'that may be suitable for such support', with a deadline of 9 February 2001. A limited number of topics of strategic importance will be selected from these and become the subject of a dedicated call for proposals from which the integrated projects will be selected. This dedicated call will be published in early summer 2001 (with a deadline of 18 October 2001). The cut off date for submission of proposals for infrastructures is 9 February 2001. The call for expressions of interest has now been published in the Official Journal of the European Communities No C 324 of 15.11.2000 p. 11.