A common narrative in European policy circles suggests a tension between two major priorities: boosting Europe’s industrial competitiveness on one hand, and advancing equitable global health access on the other.
However, the latest CEPS R&D Perspectives report ‘Equitable and resilient R&D ecosystems for health innovation and access’, authored by Dr. Luis Pizarro and Rachel Cohen, demonstrates that this is a false dichotomy. In reality, addressing global health challenges, improving health security, promoting scientific excellence, and fostering European competitiveness are mutually reinforcing priorities.
They highlight how Product Development Partnerships (PDPs) provide strong evidence of this complementarity. Recognising that market incentives alone were failing to stimulate R&D for diseases that disproportionately affect impoverished populations, PDPs emerged to combine public, philanthropic, academic and private sector expertise within non-profit partnerships capable of advancing products that would otherwise not be developed. For over 25 years, PDPs, including organisations like IAVI, MMV, TB Alliance, DNDi, and FIND, have delivered dozens of new diagnostics, vaccines, and treatments for neglected diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV, among other global health challenges.
Rather than representing a single institutional model, their experience offers practical lessons on how EU biomedical R&D can be structured to maximise public return on public investment while preparing for future health crises. The report outlines three key recommendations that echo GHA’s long-standing advocacy for a public interest-driven European health innovation ecosystem:
1 – Set up predictable, multi-year financing mechanism(s) for public interest-driven and geographically distributed R&D and manufacturing
EU R&D funding must move away from fragmented, short-cycle grants toward stable, long-term investments. Supporting regional clinical trial networks, regulatory cooperation, and local manufacturing capacity is a direct investment partners countries’ health sovereignty, and in global health security that protects Europe. These are co-investments that enhances global resilience.
More concretely:
- EU must embed collaborative principles from Global Health EDCTP3 across all European biomedical R&D funding streams, with a broadened geographic scope.
- EU funding must support PDPs and other public interest R&D collaborations, and move away from short-cycle, fragmented project-by-project grants to be more effective and efficient.
- EU should make more explicit links between its competitiveness agenda and global health agenda, and ensure greater coherence across research, preparedness, manufacturing, deployment and global health investments. This is a recommendation GHA has been stressing for several years.
2 – Mainstream access strategies in EU-funded biomedical R&D
Public investment must guarantee a public return. While affordable access provisions currently exist in the legislation governing Joint Undertakings under Horizon Europe, they remain inconsistent across programmes.
More concretely:
- Access Plans should be a standard condition in FP10 for strategic health R&D projects, as GHA and a coalition of 53 urgently demanded in an open letter to the Parliament ITRE Committee. Without contractual access provisions, public authorities de-risk early-stage research without retaining leverage over pricing supply, or distribution, and force health systems to buy back technologies taxpayers already funded.
- The EU can and should implement the binding provision under Article 9 of the WHO Pandemic Agreement establishing the principle that publicly funded R&D must be conditioned on access, affordability, transparency and knowledge sharing.
3 – Invest in the enabling infrastructure for open and collaborative science
Open science cannot remain a passive aspiration. It requires dedicated infrastructure.
More concretely:
- EU should invest systematically in the infrastructure that enables collaborative research, including sustainable platforms for sharing data, samples, and reagents, common interoperability standards, incentives for timely knowledge sharing, as well as funding mechanisms that support open science networks. GHA argues that open science and open knowledge approaches should be embedded by default in all publicly funded innovation.
As negotiations on the next MFF, FP10 and Global Europe Instrument gain momentum, European decision-makers face a critical policy choice. As the EU shifts toward strengthening its strategic autonomy and industrial baseline, it must explicitly align these goals with its global health responsibilities.
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