According to data just received by ISERD - the Israeli administration for the European Union's R&D framework program, from the European Union Commission in Brussels, research grants in the amount of approximately €13 million have been approved for Israeli industrial companies and research bodies participating in the projects of the sixth plan, in the field of life sciences
This amount constitutes 2.3% of the budget allocated to this call, and since the rate of the Israeli contribution to the overall framework program budget is 1.1%, it reflects the achievement of the Israeli researchers in this call.
The winning studies deal with basic and applied research in fields such as genetic engineering, molecular biology, cancer research and cardiovascular disease research.
Among the winning organizations are the companies Rosetta Genomics, Novamed, NuAce Technologies, Diagnostic Technologies, Biokine Therapeutics, OMRIX Biopharmaceuticals and GeneGrafts, from academia: Tel Aviv University, Ben Gurion University, the Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute and the Technion. Sorasky and Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem.
Organizations that will lead projects such as Given Imaging, which will lead a research project that deals with the diagnosis of diseases in the digestive system, will be mentioned in particular. The project is based on the swallowed pill containing a tiny camera that photographs and transmits from inside the body, developed by Given Imaging, as well as Ben Gurion University which will lead a project in the field of cancer diagnosis through the detection of blood sugar.
In this call there was a dramatic increase in the participation of Israeli industrial companies from the field of life sciences, also in terms of the number of submissions which was greater than all the submissions submitted by this industry both in the previous framework program - the fifth - and in the votes of the previous readers in the current framework, and also in terms of the success rate that was comparable to that of the traditional winner of the votes These are the academy.
It is expected that by the end of 2006, which is the last year of the Sixth Framework Program, the amount of commitments that the Israeli research community will obtain from industry and academia will equal the Israeli investment in the program, which stands at €190 million. The Chief Scientist at the Ministry of Science and Technology Dr. Eli Ofer, who serves as the Chairman of the ISERD Steering Committee, emphasizes that "beyond the return on investment, the fact that the real return to the economy and industry in Israel from participation in the program is between 5 and 10 times the financial investment in the program is important to Ein Aruch" .
With the Seventh Framework Program at the door, the CEO of ISERD, Marcel Staun, calls on the Israeli research community to take action right now, to establish relationships with parallel entities in Europe and to identify common areas of interest, in order to initiate research proposals "so that when the Commission publishes the first reader votes of the Seventh Plan, towards the end In 2006, the groups that formed will be able to submit their proposals on time," he explains.
The Seventh Framework Program -FP7- will be spread over seven years 2007-2013 and its estimated total budget will be approximately €48 billion.
