EU Life Sciences Strategy must be coordinated with data, RDI, skills and budget policies
CSC agrees with the Commission’s assessment that life sciences have a significant role to play in boosting Europe’s competitiveness and prosperity and accelerating its green and digital transitions. We therefore welcome the initiative to create an EU life sciences strategy and recommend coordinating it closely with relevant data, RDI, skills and budget policies for maximal impact.
Today’s most disruptive research and innovation is based on data. Well-managed data that is AI-ready facilitates public research and industry innovation alike. Thus, the life sciences strategy must feed into the upcoming Data Union Strategy to ensure that the latter takes into account the needs of the research and innovation community. This entails developing shared European infrastructures for storing, sharing, processing and analysing data in an efficient and secure way. Investing in secure federated data access technologies and computational resources, linking data infrastructures to the EuroHPC supercomputers and AI factories, enables analysis based on complex data, including sensitive human data. Multidata-type solutions relying on advanced computing can boost AI-powered life sciences and promote cutting-edge research and innovation.
To tackle the challenge of limited market uptake and commercialisation of life sciences innovation, the data, computing and AI infrastructures described above must also serve industry users, e.g. by providing them with targeted access models and by facilitating their partnerships with public research organisations. At the same time, it is crucial to keep core infrastructures in public ownership while ensuring interoperability with possible private counterparts. For competitiveness and security reasons, it is also key to secure European ownership of data.
Another key challenge for development and uptake of life sciences innovation is the complex and partly incoherent regulatory framework. For example, GDPR, EHDS Act and AI Act must be better coordinated with one another and complemented with clear guidelines to make application effortless and uniform across the Union. When it comes to the GDPR, the Commission must ensure that it indeed “remains in line with the digital transformation” as stated in Commissioner McGrath’s mission letter, meaning it must not excessively limit data use in RDI. This entails e.g. reassessing the data minimisation requirement that seems to be in conflict with the needs of data-intensive RDI, in particular AI development that requires vast amounts of data.
In order to address the evolving skills needs, the Life Sciences Strategy must be closely aligned with the implementation of the actions outlined in the Commission’s recent Union of Skills communication. The EU skills academies and joint study programmes must serve the needs of life sciences, and these needs must also be part of the skills intelligence that will guide education policy decisions. It is also important to recognise the role of state-of-the-art research infrastructures in skills development: they allow European researchers and innovators to learn new skills while also helping to attract new talent to Europe. All of the above must be taken into account, not only in the Life Sciences Strategy, but also in the design of the EU’s next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) and its R&D funding instruments. The new MFF must provide sustained funding for public data, computing and AI capacities while also ensuring sufficient investments in skills development. This, coupled with action to make the regulatory framework more coherent, will ensure the future success of European life sciences which in turn will make Europe more competitive, prosperous and ready to spearhead the green and digital transitions.