Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EBRA (European Brain Research Area)

Teaser

The European Brain Research Area, or EBRA, was designed to respond to the Horizon 2020 call, SC1-HCO-10-2018, entitled “Coordinating European brain research and developing global initiatives”. The overall objectives of the project are:• Facilitate efficient...

Summary

The European Brain Research Area, or EBRA, was designed to respond to the Horizon 2020 call, SC1-HCO-10-2018, entitled “Coordinating European brain research and developing global initiatives”. The overall objectives of the project are:
• Facilitate efficient collaboration, communication and operational synergies.
• Foster alignment and better co-ordination of research strategies across European and global brain initiatives.
• Facilitate the emergence of research projects in specific areas in active clusters.
• Provide them with support for effective collaboration.
• Enabling sharing of data and access to research infrastructures.
• Increase the visibility of the brain research portfolio as a whole.
• Promote the uptake of EBRA results to key stakeholders.
Over the next three years, the EBRA Consortium will work to facilitate efficient collaboration, communication and operational synergies, including transparent procedures and setting up of governance mechanisms; foster alignment and better co-ordination of research strategies across European and global brain initiatives; facilitate the emergence of research projects in specific areas in active clusters, and provide them with support for effective collaboration, including enabling sharing of data and access to research infrastructures; and increase the visibility of the brain research portfolio as a whole and promote the uptake of EBRA results to key stakeholders.
Brain research is a vital part of the research community and for society, particularly as many brain conditions remain mysterious, misunderstood, untreatable and incurable. An estimated 179 million European citizens live with brain conditions — mental and neurological alike — with 1 in 3 bound to suffer from a brain condition at some point in their life. Brain research helps society alleviate these burdens and move towards a world where brain disorders are treatable and curable.

Work performed

The project was launched in November 2018. Overall project management (WP1) has carried out as planned, with contracts and agreements settled, the set-up of structures/procedures/work flows progressing and the organisation of consortium meeting(s) completed.

Within WP2, the following objectives have been reached:

1. Mapping of the European brain research landscape

The aim of the European Brain Research Area (EBRA) is to bring together the various stakeholders and major brain research initiatives to identify the objectives and priorities of European brain research. For this purpose, a mapping exercise was conducted, which aims to provide an overview of the current landscape of the European brain research funded in the EU framework programmes and the funding initiatives of JPND, NEURON and Human Brain Project.

During the first reporting period, the following steps of the mapping have been performed:

• Contact with the European Commission to receive information on the EU-funded projects of the last 11 years (from 2008-2019)
• Defining the outcomes of interest
• Creation of a database including all EU brain-related project abstracts
• Classification of the project abstracts into the different brain topic categories.

Eventually, all brain research projects were identified and classified into different brain research areas. We are now working on the preliminary results and the data will be further analysed in the upcoming months and encompassed in a report to be made publicly available. This report will feed into the SEBRA, or Shared European Brain Research Agenda.

2. Selecting research clusters and the activities that will be supported by EBRA

As one of the objectives of EBRA is to help research networks and projects across a range of critical areas and/or cross cutting issues to emerge as “active clusters” and possibly initiate European and/or global initiatives, a call for clusters was opened and two clusters were selected.

During this first year of the project, we have focused on the following activities:
• Developing a call for cluster proposals
• Setting up an online platform for the management of the submission and evaluation of the proposals
• Developing guidelines for the evaluation
• Collecting and evaluating proposals received at the first cut-off date
• Selection of the first two clusters: EPI-Cluster on epilepsy and Prevention of Severe Mental Disorders (PSMD) Cluster, which will start their activities supported by EBRA in January 2020.
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The primary objective of the EPI-Cluster is to establish a collaborative framework for the coordinated actions of epilepsy research in Europe, while the PSMD Cluster is the first European research consortium that has been established to tackle the above limitations of knowledge and foster research for the prevention of severe mental disorders.

Some preliminary activities have been performed within WP4 related to Quality assurance in preclinical research”. Quality criteria have been set, which strives to increase the value of biomedical research at the Berlin Institute of Health and beyond.
A survey has been performed among EBRA funding organizations (17 from NEURON and JPND, plus Wellcome Trust, NIH and others) to assess whether these quality criteria are respected when assessing proposals. The data will be analysed and the results will be presented in the next reporting period.

WP5 is fully underway, ensuring proper dissemination and communication of the project and centres around outreach and the involvement of patients at later stages. A dissemination and communication plan has been defined at the beginning of the project, which includes the definition of the tools to be used for communication of EBRA, such as: an official website,Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, newsletters, project brochure and other visual materials and press releases. Events and workshops have been organised by the partners. The website and social media accounts

Final results

EBRA will advance the state of the art by promoting the coordination of European brain research and development of global initiatives through a consistent methodology covering all the key activities to be performed, consistently underpinned by a participatory design approach (active participation and co-design). This approach incorporates the processes required to develop consensus building mechanisms: i.e. stakeholder engagement and consultation.

The expected impact of EBRA are still relevant and are as follows:

• Reduce fragmentation and duplication of research efforts and foster synergies through enhanced coordination of brain research efforts at EU and at global level.
• Improve access to and optimise the use of research infrastructures and data sources by the neuroscience research communities, thus ensuring better exploitation of the large investments made in brain research.
• Achieve critical mass and economies of scale by initiating and fostering new global research initiatives.
• Enable and accelerate the translation of breakthroughs in brain research into relevant clinical applications

Website & more info

More info: https://www.ebra.eu.