Driven by the VPHi executive director Prof Lies Geris, the VPHi community put forward a FET flagship proposal on "Transforming the challenge of ageing into an age of opportunity"
34 between academic and industry organisations strongly involved in in silico medicine research had work together over the past year to respond to the recent H2020 FET Flagship call that closed on 20 Feb 2018. FET Flagships are science- and technology-driven, large-scale, multidisciplinary research initiatives built around a visionary unifying goal. They tackle grand science and technology challenges requiring cooperation among a range of disciplines, communities and programmes.
The innovative I2AGE proposal aims to deliver a thorough mathematically-phrased and biophysically-based understanding of the physiology of ageing that will enable Europe to cope with the coming demographic storm through transformative scientific and technological advances.
The proportion of people in Europe aged 65 years and older will increase by 2050 from 18% to 28%. This will lead to a steep increase in healthcare costs, which without reform will become unaffordable. I2AGE is founded on breakthrough developments in a range of disciplines already showing promise for enhanced understanding and control of human physiology. Yet it is the physiology of ageing, which is more complex and underpins so many diseases, that now needs to be addressed. To this end, I2AGE will focus on radically improve our capacity to compress morbidity and extend the health span, by
I2AGE will target four major cost-impacting health care domains – prevention, drugs, medical devices, and advanced therapies – and the regulatory approval pipelines for these domains, to demonstrate convincingly that our take on taming the complexity of ageing physiology is indeed the right one. Building on local, national, European and international initiatives, the I2AGE ecosystem for researchers, innovators, industries and governments will take a mission-oriented, impact-focused approach, allowing alignment with EU and national research & innovation investments.
Through its technological, biological and responsible R&I activities, I2AGE will invest in innovative ideas with scale-up potential through Europe. Education and coaching of new researchers and entrepreneurs under the I2AGE umbrella will sustainably enhance the R&I ecosystem with impacts well beyond the time frame of this Flagship.
The EC received 33 proposals that will be now evaluated by scientific experts. The evaluation will be divided into two steps. In the first step, the scientific excellence and impact of the proposals will be evaluated. The successful ones will then be invited to submit a more detailed proposal by 18 September for the second step of the evaluation.
We will keep you posted on further development!
