JPco-fuND

On December 4th, 2014, JPND announced a major new cohesive action with the European Commission entitled ‘JPco-fuND’. This initiative launched a joint transnational call for proposals in January 2015 aimed at supporting international research collaborations in three JPND priority areas:

  • Longitudinal Cohort Approaches
  • Advanced Experimental Models
  • Risk and Protective Factors* 

(* a re-launch of the  2012 JPND ‘risk factors’ call)

About the co-funded call

This joint transnational co-funded call is launched in partnership with the European Commission under the ERA-NET Co-fund scheme with the aim to tackle this leading medical and societal challenge faced by our society.

Three priority topics form the basis for the Call – Longitudinal Cohorts, Advanced Experimental Models and Risk/Protective Factors.  These three topics have emerged through a consultative process between research opinion leaders and JPND member organisations, focussed on delivering the understanding, tools and capabilities to underpin the development of new preventive and therapeutic approaches for neurodegenerative diseases.

As a partner of JPND and under Horizon 2020, the European Commission is providing additional funding to ‘top up’ the funding that is being made available through national/regional funding organisations.  This initiative will see more than 30 million euro being made available from the JPND member countries, with a significant additional European Commission “topping up” fund.

The goal of the partners is to maximize the number of high quality transnational scientific projects that can be funded through this call.

Further detail on the call is provided on the call for proposals page. 

Note:  The call closed for pre-proposals on March 10th, 2015.

According to Professor Philippe Amouyel, Chair of the JPND Management Board:

“This unique co-funded initiative transforms the European Commission into a new JPND partner, establishing a concrete synergy with Horizon 2020 to address this global threat. This is a significant scale-up of implementation of the JPND research strategy, and a major step forward towards the realisation of a “European Research Area” dedicated to neurodegenerative disease research – an issue central to the joint programming concept.”

Recently appointed European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, Carlos Moedas says:

“The Joint Programming approach by the EU is aimed at tackling the health-related, social, technological, and environmental “grand challenges” which face all of our citizens. Thanks to this new co-funded initiative between JPND and the European Commission, the best European scientific, medical and healthcare/social researchers will be working together and pooling resources to help the millions of people who suffer from Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. By making research more efficient and avoiding duplication of work, this initiative will increase the prospects of real progress in preventing and treating these diseases.”

About the JPco-fuND initiative

JPco-fuND is a five-year initiative (2014-2019) and will build on the considerable momentum and experience gained through JUMPAHEAD, the coordination action that supported JPND from 2010-2014. JPco-fuND tasks will be:

  1. Maintaining a structure for the organization of the JPco-fuND call and other activities
  2. Implementing a call via the ERA-NET Cofund mechanism
  3. Implementing other JPND calls without EU cofunding
  4. Coordinating a number of Actions Groups and converting their recommendations into specific actions
  5. Developing outreach and engagement with other international/national/regional initiatives
  6. Communicating/disseminating on activities and initiatives of JPco-fuND
  7. Monitoring and evaluating the impact of JPco-fuND actions

These tasks will be included within the following workpackages:

  • WP1- Management and coordination (Leader = Inserm, France)
  • WP2- Preparation and launch of the co-funded call (Leader = DLR, Germany)
  • WP3- Evaluation and proposal selection for the co-funded call (Leader = DLR, Germany)
  • WP4- Follow-up and monitoring of projects resulting from the co-funded call (Leader = ZonMw, Netherlands)
  • WP5- Communication, Exploitation and Dissemination of the results (Leader = Fondation Alzheimer, France)
  • WP6- Additional activities (including other joint activities such as calls without EU co-funding). (Leader = Inserm, France; Co-leaders = ISCIII, Spain; Ministry of Health, Italy)

 

In 2019, JPND performed an internal self-assessment on the progress of JPND and in particular JPSustaiND from November 2015 to February 2019. An external evaluation was also conducted, to provide an independent review of JPND’s performance to date.

An executive summary of the resulting report is available for download at the link below.

JPND Achievements and Performance Internal and External Executive Summary

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 643417 – JPco-fuND.