Strategic Consensus Meeting 2011
The VPH NoE Strategic Consensus meeting took place on Friday 30th September at the Hotel Icaria Barcelona, Spain. This was held in conjunction with the VPH Network of Excellence Annual General Meeting (AGM) on 29th September which took place in the same location. The Virtual Physiological Human Institute for Integrative Biomedical Research (VPH Institute) also held its first General Assembly in Barcelona in the afternoon of Wednesday 28th of September and was attended by many VPH NoE members.
The Strategic Consensus meeting was designed to facilitate discussion on the general strategic directions for the VPH community in the coming years. Peter Coveney chaired the meeting with moderators Peter Hunter and Marco Viceconti.
Joel Bacquet, Project officer for VPH NoE opened the meeting by updating the VPH community on details of the next proposed funding framework from the European Commission - Horizon2020. Horizon2020 is proposed to be the new, integrated funding system that will cover all research and innovation funding currently provided through the Framework Programme for Research and Technical Development, the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). The proposed amount for Horizon2020 is €80 billion (in constant 2011 prices) which is a 46% increase in comparison to the current period (2007-2013). Research and innovation should also increase to 8.5% of the overall EU budget. The final decision on Horizon2020 will be taken in late 2011 or early 2012.
Joel Bacquet also highlighted the pilot European Innovation Partnership in Active and Healthy Ageing (EIPAHA) and detailed how this is to be seen as a ‘triple win’ for Europe:
- enabling EU citizens to lead healthy, active and independent lives while ageing;
- improving the sustainability and efficiency of social and health care systems;
- boosting and improving the competitiveness of the markets for innovative products and services, responding to the ageing challenge at both EU and global level, thus creating new opportunities for businesses.
The pilot aims to increase the average healthy lifespan by two years by 2020 and will do this by bringing together key stakeholders (end users, public authorities, industry); all actors in the innovation cycle, from research to adoption (adaptation), along with those engaged in standardisation and regulation. There has been no official communication from the European Commission on how the VPH could fit into these new programmes although the VPH FP7 2013 work programme could feasibly bridge towards Horizon2020 or could also fit in with the new pilot EIP in Active and Healthy Ageing.
Marco Viceconti looked at where VPH could fit into Horizon2020 from the position of the VPH Institute. He detailed the ARGOS position paper – an initiative whose aim was to foster transatlantic integration of the VPH effort in Europe and the US and also discussed the VPH Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) Support Action Roadmap. Marco stated that VPH could be the key which brings together many different common threads in European Healthcare - the Digital Patient, In silico clinical trials, and personal health forecasting and he proposed that VPH research could fit with the proposed ‘ICT for Health in Horizon 2020 ICT for societal challenges: in silico based medicine’. Vanessa Diaz, coordinator of the new Discipulus - roadmap of the Digital Patient support action, which started on 1st October 2011, further elaborated on this. The Digital Patient is the digital representation of the health status/history of patients and can be used for healthcare at all levels for personalized prevention/diagnosis/treatment and research. Vanessa detailed how it was the focus of the project to get VPH research into the clinics and into industry. Alfons Hoekstra discussed in silico clinical trials highlighting how the Pharma, Medical Devices and Biotech Industry were targets for trials and noting early examples of trials by existing VPH projects - VPHOP, PreDiCT and RT3S. Lastly, Marco Viceconti discussed how personal health forecasting was the way forward as demographic changes, cultural change and exploding costs of healthcare increasingly show a need for a role of prevention and early diagnosis.
Members of the VPH NoE gave updates on the direction the network will be taking in the coming year as the project is due to end in November 2012. Peter Coveney, VPH NoE Project Co-ordinator gave a talk on how VPH projects need a large-scale distributed European grid infrastructure which are able to accommodate their diverse, heterogeneous requirements in terms of storage, computing power and networks. He discussed how the e-infrastructure is currently fragmented and there was a need for a coherent approach with combined resources to establish an integrated system. VPH projects should work with service providers such as PRACE, EGI, EUDAT, MAPPER & CRESTA, plus the ESFRI Roadmap & FET Initiatives such as ITFoM as supporting ICT resources will continue to be required for many years to come.
Keith McCormack gave a talk on the VPH NoE ToolKit and ToolKit portal. The ToolKit aims to provide the technical and methodological framework to support and enable VPH research and the ToolKit portal is a shared and mutually accessible source of research equipment, managerial and research infrastructures, facilities and services. This portal is a major component of achievements the VPH NoE and the forthcoming final year's work of the NoE will be dedicated to enabling this valuable work to be sustained in the hands of both new and enduring structures, including the VPH Institute and VPH-Share.
Peter Hunter closed the meeting with a discussion on the VPH NoE 2011 update of the vision and strategy document, the document which is coordinated by the VPH NoE to channel the views of the community and to inform European Commission policy for this field. Peter Hunter discussed how the next update to the document will evolve to cover international VPH research. Marco Viceconti stated that the next document should also target the digital patient, personal health forecasting, and in silico clinical trials. The discussions during the whole meeting will provide the basis for the next update of the document (due in December 2011) and more details on this will be available soon. For slide presentations of the Strategic Consensus meeting please click here.