The pandemic has shown that health is essential for social and economic well-being. This investment identifies frontline health technologies as a key and strategic area for recovery, and proposes: a flagship precision personalized health project to improve the health of the Spanish population; measures to strengthen the strategic capacities and internationalization of the National Health System; participation in the multi-country project “The Genome of Europe” within the “1 Million Genomes” initiative; and measures to strengthen capacities linked to the pandemic and aging.
The Ministries of Science and Innovation and Health will join forces for the development of new technologies of interest to the National Health System and its implementation, especially through this investment and measure 15 of component 16 on the implementation and development of a Health Innovation Office.
The measures that will be carried out in this investment are the following:
Emblematic project of personalized health of precision in collaboration with the Ministry of Health.
Measures to strengthen the strategic capacities and internationalization of the National Health System:
- Calls for grants, including: Reinforcement of the annual call for Strategic Action in Health (AES) to increase the scientific capacities of the research centers associated to the SNS; Calls linked to the financing of unique scientific-technical equipment and special calls for the renewal of scientific-technical equipment in obsolescence; New call for public-private collaboration for the incorporation of the GMP/GLP environment to the research groups of the SNS and Grants related to the seal of Excellence -ISCIII-Health.
- Measures for the internationalization of the SNS: aid for the positioning of Spain in the European Associations and Infrastructures in Health and for the positioning of Spain in the European environment in the field of Personalized Medicine. It also includes the establishment of a support service to promote Spanish participation in the EU HEALTH program and strengthen such participation in Horizonte Europa.
Participation in the multi-country project “The Genome of Europe (GoE)”. This European project aims to contribute to the “1 Million Genomes” initiative by creating a European population-based cohort of 500,000 sequences of complete genomes of European citizens. For this, the creation of a federation of national cohorts is proposed, in the case of Spain it is estimated that the contribution would be with a sequenced data cohort of 10% (50,000 inhabitants) representative of our population. This initiative fits in with the IMPaCT program that was already being developed in Spain. In the component the following activities will be carried out:
- Call for the creation of a distributed infrastructure for the monitoring of a large-scale multipurpose population cohort.
- Creation, study and monitoring of a large-scale multipurpose population cohort with clinical, epidemiological and biological information to represent the entire Spanish population, which will allow us to build predictive models, identify inequalities, monitor key indicators and evaluate the impact of health policies.
Capacity-building measures linked to the pandemic and ageing are as follows:
- Reinforcement of the National Epidemiology Center and the National Microbiology Center.
- Installation of a Level 4 Biological Containment Laboratory (NBS-4).
- Strengthening of the infrastructures for training in public health and preventive medicine in the National Schools of Health and Occupational Medicine.
- Strengthening research and training in Climate Change, Health and Urban Environment and non-toxic chemicals, in response to the threat posed to public health by climate change and the loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystems, modifying the way we consider risk factor prevention and the protection of vulnerable populations.
- Establishment of interdisciplinary research teams that propose and develop solutions in all aspects of the pandemic and its long-term consequences, in collaboration with the clinic and the industrial sector: prevention, transmission, diagnosis, therapy, social impact and communication. The aim is to be able to provide as quickly as possible the appropriate training and dissemination so that society takes measures that reduce the impact on future pandemics.
- Regarding aging: research projects to achieve a substantial improvement of the quality of life in an increasingly aging population, developing and applying the latest advances in molecular and genetic techniques to address neurologically based problems, with special attention to integrating its connection with the immune, digestive and cardiovascular systems, and finding solutions that complement medication and treatments with the adoption of lifestyles, socially and culturally active.
