The pandemic has shown that health is essential to social and economic well-being. This investment identifies frontline health technologies as a key strategic area for recovery, and proposes: a flagship project on personalised precision health to improve the health of the Spanish population; measures to strengthen the strategic capabilities and internationalisation of the National Health System; participation in the multi-country project "The Genome of Europe" within the "1 Million Genomes" initiative; and capacity building measures linked to pandemic and ageing.
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 their implementation, in particular through this investment and measure 15 of component 16 on the implementation and development of a Health Innovation Office.
The measures to be carried out in this investment are as follows:
Flagship project on personalised precision health in collaboration with the Ministry of Health.
Measures to strengthen the strategic capacities and internationalisation of the National Health System:
- Calls for proposals for grants, including: Reinforcement of the annual call for Strategic Action in Health (AES) to increase the scientific capacities of research centres associated with the NHS; Calls linked to the financing of unique scientific-technical equipment and special calls for the renewal of obsolescent scientific-technical equipment; New call for public-private collaboration for the incorporation of the GMP/GLP environment into NHS research groups and Grants related to the ISCIII-Health Seal of Excellence.
- Measures for the internationalisation of the NHS: aid for the positioning of Spain in European Health Associations and Infrastructures and for the positioning of Spain in the European environment in the field of Personalised Medicine. It also envisages the establishment of a support service to promote Spanish participation in the EU HEALTH programme and to strengthen this participation in Horizon Europe.
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 whole genome sequences of European citizens. To this end, 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 cohort of sequenced data of 10% (50,000 inhabitants) representative of our population. This initiative aligns with the IMPaCT programme already underway in Spain. The following activities will be carried out in the component:
- Call for the creation of a distributed infrastructure for the monitoring of a large-scale multi-purpose population cohort.
- Creation, study and follow-up of a large-scale multi-purpose population cohort with clinical and epidemiological information and biological samples to represent the entire Spanish population, which will make it possible 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 Centre for Epidemiology and the National Centre for Microbiology.
- Installation of a Biological Containment Level 4 Laboratory (NBS-4).
- Strengthening the infrastructure 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, as a response to the threat to public health posed by climate change and the loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystems, changing the way we consider prevention of risk factors and protection of vulnerable populations.
- Establishment of interdisciplinary research teams to propose and develop solutions on all aspects of the pandemic and its long-term consequences, in collaboration with the clinical and industrial sectors: prevention, transmission, diagnosis, therapy, social impact and communication. The aim is to be able to provide as quickly as possible the appropriate training and information for society to take measures to reduce the impact of future pandemics.
- Regarding ageing: research projects to achieve a substantial improvement in the quality of life in an increasingly ageing population, developing and applying the latest advances in molecular and genetic techniques to address neurological-based problems, with special attention to integrating their connection with the immune, digestive and cardiovascular systems, and finding solutions that complement medication and treatments with the adoption of socially and culturally active lifestyles.