Benefits of International Collaboration in Traumatic Brain Injury Research

Global challenges need critical mass and an economy of scale to be successfully tackled. The €54 billion Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development (FP7) is the instrument through which the European Union (EU) funds collaborative research projects bringing together scientists from European and non-European countries, including the USA. Within FP7, the €32 billion ‘Cooperation' program supports excellent researchers from academia, hospitals, small and medium enterprises and large industries who cooperate transnationally to address ambitious objectives in key areas such as health research that would be impossible to achieve alone.

With a budget of €6.1 billion for the period 2007–2013, health research represents almost 19% of the FP7 budget for collaborative research. It has among its main objectives the promotion of clinical research and the translation of basic discoveries into clinical applications in several areas of high socio-economic and clinical importance, such as research on the brain and its diseases. It is estimated that disorders of the brain affect 1 out of 4 Europeans and account for 35% of the burden of all diseases in Europe. In response to this need, the EU devoted some €465 million - and more than 90 projects – to brain research, including traumatic brain injury (TBI), for the period 2007-2010.

To fight the current economic contingency, specific EU initiatives are in place to boost innovation and the translation of results from "bench to bed". Among these, the Europe 2020 strategy, the EU's political blueprint for the next decade, involves the Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy Aging. In addition, the Innovative Medicine Initiative, the €2 billion public-private partnership between the European Commission and the European Pharmaceutical Industry Association, is designed to enhance pre-competitive research in targeted areas such as brain diseases, where €50 million have been invested to date.

Finally, FP7 includes international cooperation activities, such as programme-level cooperation between the EU and the US, to tackle global issues that cannot be solved only with EU efforts. An area that could benefit from synergistic USA/EU actions is the field of TBI. Effective generalised therapies for TBI currently lack due to bad translatability of pre-clinical results and the heterogeneity of TBI injuries. The US/EU collaboration would help harmonize therapeutic standards and increase efficacy of clinical trials, eventually improving health outcomes in and outside Europe.