November 2017 – Reports – ESRS ANSS EU Committee
Published in ESRS Newsletter November 2017
ESRS ANSS EU Committee
Members (2016 – 2018):
Roberto Amici (Coordinator), Diego Garcia Borreguero (Vice-Coordinator), Liborio Parrino (EC ANSS Chair), Damien Leger, Pierre-Hervé Luppi, Walter McNicholas, Lino Nobili, Tiina Paunio, Philippe Peigneux, Dieter Riemann, Debra J. Skene, Johan Verbraecken
The main aims of the Committee are: i) to bring the topics of “sleep” and “sleep disorders” to the attention of the EU in order to receive support for research and teaching activities; ii) to promote sleep-related issues from a political point of view at a European and national level.
The activity of the EU Committee in the past months has been aimed at elaborating new strategies in order to put forward at EU level “Sleep and Sleep Disorders” as a topic for H2020 upcoming calls and for the new EU 2021-2030 platform which is expected to be launched in the next few years. The document addressing the need for more funding for sleep research, which has been finalized in 2016 in collaboration with the Assembly of the National Sleep Societies (ANSS), is available at https://esrs.eu/about/committees/esrs-anss-eu-committee/documents/. With respect to this, further attempts to contact relevant EU officers of the pillar “Health” of the DG “Research and Innovation” have been made, aimed at organizing new meetings in Brussels.
This topic has been discussed in a recent TC of the Committee in which the outcomes of an analysis of the distribution of EU funding for research and innovation in the last fifteen years has been further discussed. Such outcomes clearly indicate that the percentage of total EU funding specifically allocated for sleep research was reduced four times in FP7 and H2020 compared to FP6. The number of financed projects in which the word “sleep” appears in the title is five time or thirty time less than that of those in which the words “pain” or “cancer” appear, respectively.
Actions of the NSS Presidents and Boards aimed at addressing the issue of sleep research at the level of the “National Contact Points” of the pillar “Health” of the DG “Research and Innovation”, in order to sensitize the National Members of the Advisory Board which is in charge to finalize the new EU research frameworks, are warmly recommended.
Roberto Amici