Brain-related diseases and disorders of the nervous system impose a heavy burden on more than 380 million patients in Europe alone, who suffer from extensive loss of quality of life during the course of disease. They also strongly impact the patients’ families, friends, and care-givers. Therapy and care management are still suboptimal and health care systems have to deal with ever-rising costs. The enormous number of affected patients, their care-givers, and the financial burden on the society underscore the huge impact of these diseases.
Research into brain-related diseases and disorders of the nervous system greatly benefits from an interdisciplinary approach. It is now imperative that questions of brain functioning and progress on preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic measures are addressed by combining methodologies, skills, and expertise from different disciplines.
Interdisciplinary collaboration is even more successful when it is not limited by national boarders, and the best international research partners cooperate.
The ERA-NET NEURON Cofund supported basic, clinical and translational research in the diverse fields of disease-related neuroscience. The ERA-NET comprised 25 funding organisations from 18 countries. 22 of them are EU member states, three of them are EU-associated countries, and Canada as global partner.
Due to the importance of research in the area of brain diseases, a variety of independent national and regional funding programmes exist in most countries. NEURON Cofund addressed the problems of fragmentation in the national efforts by co-ordinating national and regional programmes for disease-related neuroscience research. This included the participating funding organisations and associated partners across Europe, Israel, and Canada. The extension of the collaboration beyond the European Research Area into North America reflected the global dimension of brain research, and increased NEURON’s effectiveness. The ERA-NET served as a platform for funding agencies and ministries to develop joint activities and programmes to coordinate high quality research across national borders. One of the core activities were annually launched joint transnational calls for pro-posals for research consortia operating in the NEURON partner countries. The main objective of NEURON Cofund was to facilitate close and sustainable networking and alignment of national and regional research programmes in the areas of neuroscience, neurology, and psychiatry carried out in partner countries. Implementation of joint transnational research funding activities was the key instrument to achieve this goal.
The main objective of NEURON Cofund was divided into two types of activities.
Part A comprised activities related to the co-funded call (JTC2016, work packages, WP1-5).
Part B comprised work packages related to additional activities, WP6-8, including the non-co-funded calls JTC2017-2020.
It should be noted that NEURON is continued as ERA-NET NEURON Cofund2 from 2021 – 2025 and launched a cofunded call in 2021, and a voluntary call in 2022.
