Europe getting jiggy with it
All across Europe right now, as funding season opens for the main European Commission funding programme FP7, companies and researchers are experiencing the hitherto undiscovered experience of getting up close and personal, quite often with complete strangers.
The mating game of the Framework Programme Seven call is a strange one for many. Academics are used to the familiar faces and routines of a lifetime within the same small circle, in many ways the gentry of science – plenty of close marriages there to protect the bloodline. While small companies are the wide boys of the game – circling warily and nervously, looking for that elusive marriage that brings status and money that they can squander on some high risk turn of the card…. Finally, the large co.s, like enormous crocodiles basking in the sun, watching what’s going on, sometimes striking successfully and other times a little too slow off the mudbank.
Let’s leave out the big co.s, the machinations of internal workings needed to get permission to do anything within 6 months of initial request, usually counts them out of the FP7 tango. The academics and small companies provide enough entertainment to last the season. As Europe wonders where all the money went (a familiar lament within biotech for many years now, glad you could join us), the increasingly SME-oriented Framework Programme is financing marriages never seen before.
The game starts with a jolly good idea from a company or academic group. At the very start, the expectations are wildly different – the academic daydream is another 3 years of secured funding and a step in the right direction towards that Nobel prize, while the company will be watching the dwindling coffers, feeling the hot breath of investors on their necks and looking for the dreamy partnership of a large pharma and lots of lovely money (don’t worry dear readers, it is crushed early in the process).
The next step is to read the call for proposals fully and realise that it wasn’t written just for you – sometimes it has impertinence to suggest that you might not be able to do it all by yourself and that you may have to bring in one or two other people. Phooey say the applicants and they start eying up the contenders on the dance floor. Academic groups will be generally looking for other academic groups to start with – stay in your comfort zone, before realising that you have just allocated 99% of the budget to other academics and that call did mention 35% needing to go to SMEs. ‘What on earth do they need all that money for?’ is the lament and they start the messy business of trying to understand how on earth their brilliant research could actually leave the lab and fall into the grubby hands of the wide boys.
The wide boys, I mean small companies, on the other hand, have come up with a wizard way to spend the money all on themselves, even though they have a staff of 6, and that includes Chris who makes the tea and fills the pipette boxes. And surprisingly, for companies often borne of academic innovation, the view back into academia for partners is rather cloudy, particularly beyond the close academic group that may have provided the founding technology.
But the dance finally starts with a few contacts and the general idea that their various talents might contribute towards the topic of the EC call. It starts slowly, after all, it’s weeks until the deadline…with nicely phrased suggestions and plenty of pretending that you know what the hell one of the others is talking about. There will be a mad one – it’s the law – and your project idea will suddenly grow horns and charge off into the next field, scattering innocent victims left right and centre. If you are lucky, somebody will see sense and ask why a project aimed at developing a new therapy really needs a floating laboratory in the Med and technicians with see through labcoats or the need to smuggle snails out of Chile in your pockets.
While you are fitting in occasional project conversations around the edges of your usual full time job, time is ticking on – without realising it, the band has finished the drum solo and is moving on towards the grand finale. The deadline, once so far away is suddenly next week and people find themselves taking off all their clothes without even asking the surname of their partners.
Luckily, the terror of an imminent deadline overcomes all shyness (and madness) and the project idea rapidly finds a more sensible focus, especially after you realise that you forgot to add 60% overheads onto all your costs and have to cancel the order for the transparent yacht and coat with snail smuggling pockets.
One final night and day of frenzied activities, where children are forgotten, coffee is drunk cold and you have shouted (through the magic of Skype) at somebody with a Nobel prize for chemistry, the proposal is submitted. You emerge blinking into the sunlight (well, rain if in Brussels), realise you have just spent a torrid night with a group of semi-strangers and slowly put your clothes back on. You check what their surnames were from the project description (just to make it respectable), smile in an embarrassed fashion at each other and survey the scenes of devastation in your email box and waste basket.
Don’t worry, you’ll recover and you will do it again next time, you floozy.
Claire Skentelbery
Secretary General
European Biotechnology Network
The European Biotechnology Network is part of a charitable foundation with the mission to build partnerships across the biotechnology sector in Europe. As well as a directory with over 2400 R&D active company listings, the Network runs a Biotechnology Funding Hub which tracks research funding available to companies across the globe, including FP7 and NIH funding programmes. It works with partners all over the world to build the right partnerships for successful delivery of biotech to the market, field and clinic. Individual membership is free of charge so come an join the family!
