Emmanuel Macron unveiled on Tuesday a list of 16 new biomedical research centers in France, part of the Health Innovation 2030 plan aimed at strengthening France’s international attractiveness in this area. “It is out of date to oppose public and private (…) We see that faced with the logic of silos, the time has come to work on a more unified, better endowed biomedical research”, underlined the president of the Republic during a visit to the premises of the Institut Curie in Saint-Cloud.
Four new “bioclusters”
Emmanuel Macron announced the labeling of 12 new university hospital institutes (IHU) – in addition to the seven already existing – and four new “bioclusters”, large research sites associating public and private, which will be added to a first biocluster on oncology created in recent years at Saclay. These newly labeled centers of excellence are scattered across France, from Villejuif to Bordeaux, via Garches, Lyon or Marseille. Institut Curie is notably on the list of winning IHUs.
These centers are specifically dedicated to subjects as diverse as gerontology (Toulouse), female cancers (Institut Curie in Paris), or cerebrovascular diseases (Bordeaux), etc. The stated objective being to bring together the various health skills – care, research and innovation – within centers of excellence and thus to allow the development of integrated health research projects to “improve the health of patients, the organization care and the health system”.
The Health Innovation 2030 plan with a total envelope of 7.5 billion euros
At the same time, a call for projects will be launched in a few days to offer teams comprising among the “best scientists in the world” funding over a period of five years to carry out research programs in France, via the creation of “fifty of chairs of excellence” in biology and health, added Emmanuel Macron, specifying that he wanted to make “up to two million euros” available to each of these chairs.
The Health Innovation 2030 plan, a health version of the “France 2030” plan, has a total budget of 7.5 billion euros. Of this amount, more than one billion will be devoted to research and other programs of excellence will be launched soon, announced the Head of State.