The European Commission’s “Choose Europe for Life Sciences” strategy, launched in July 2025, aims to position Europe as the world’s leading hub for life sciences innovation by 2030. The initiative seeks to accelerate innovation, facilitate market access, and build public trust in new technologies, ensuring they benefit people and the planet through comprehensive reforms across research ecosystems, regulatory frameworks, and innovation uptake.
In this interview, BBMRI Director General Jens K. Habermann discusses the contribution that ERICs can provide to the strategy.
The Strategy “Choose Europe for Life Sciences” aims to position the EU as the world’s most attractive place for life sciences by 2030. In your view, what are the key priorities to address to achieve this goal?
Europe already has a strong foundation in life sciences — world-class infrastructures, a vibrant research landscape, and exceptional talent. Yet, fragmentation, regulatory complexity, and uneven investment continue to hold back its full potential. To achieve the 2030 vision, Europe must build a more coherent, competitive, and innovation-friendly environment with research infrastructures at its core, working alongside other key stakeholders.
The focus should be on strengthening collaboration across initiatives contributing to the same vision both from the public and private sectors, establishing sustainable funding models to support them, reducing administrative and regulatory barriers that slow innovation and advancing a One Health approach for greater societal impact.
How do you think this will impact the ERICs involved in the Health & Food cluster?
Research Infrastructures are strategic assets within Europe’s research and innovation ecosystem. They provide data, resources, and collaborative platforms that drive excellence and innovation. The ERICs in the Health & Food cluster are therefore key players in achieving the Strategy’s objectives.
The Strategy aims to unlock the potential of data and digital technologies by improving access to large-scale, high-quality datasets and enabling their effective use and analysis. This directly supports the work of Life Science ERICs, which already provide robust systems for improving data access, quality, and interoperability, under governance models that promote trust and cooperation across Member States. Scaling up these efforts will be essential to build a truly integrated and data-driven European life-science ecosystem.
The Strategy’s commitment to strengthening research careers and talent mobility will also have a positive impact on ERICs, helping them attract and retain skilled professionals and operate more effectively across borders. The ERIC Forum is already addressing these issues across the RI landscape, advocating for harmonised employment conditions and greater cross-border mobility — efforts that the Strategy could further reinforce and help translate into practice.
Finally, ERICs stand to benefit from increased public and private investment that the Strategy aims to stimulate, creating a more supportive environment for connecting to the industry for a greater impact.
What do you think are the most critical challenges for clinical research in Europe?
A key challenge lies in fragmented and complex regulations. Differences in ethical, legal and regulatory frameworks, data standards, and burdensome administrative processes make cross-border and cross-sector collaboration complex and resource-intensive. This is especially relevant when talking about collaboration between research and industry, which are essential to accelerate the path from samples/data to new diagnostics, therapies and technologies. Simpler, streamlined rules to facilitate collaboration and public-private partnerships are therefore essential.
Secondly, many European research infrastructures — the backbone of clinical and health research — continue to operate under limited and fragmented funding. This undermines their capacity for strategic planning, long-term sustainability, and talent retention. The new dedicated pillar for Research Infrastructures under the FP10 proposal is a welcome development, but funding must extend beyond building costs and co-funding models. To achieve real impact, the European Commission and Member States must ensure sustained, flexible investment that allows existing infrastructures to scale up and fully deliver on Europe’s life-science ambitions.
Lastly, the most pressing challenge is to break the silo mentality that continues to fragment Europe’s research landscape. Despite many valuable EU and national initiatives, limited coordination, overlapping mandates, and fragmented governance reduce efficiency and blur accountability. Europe must move beyond isolated efforts and build a truly integrated, collaborative ecosystem that connects existing infrastructures, initiatives, and stakeholders across sectors and borders. Only through such alignment can Europe unlock its full potential in clinical and health research.
How does the Strategy “Choose Europe for Life Sciences” aim to address them?
The Strategy seeks to address these challenges through a set of concrete measures to realise the Choose Europe ambition. Key actions include new investment mechanisms that aim to strengthen public–private collaboration, the creation of an European Life Sciences R&I Data Assembly to improve data governance and interoperability or the creation of a repository of tools and best practices in responsible R&I to improve public trust and outreach.
Ultimately, these actions’ success will depend not only on their realization but also on their effective integration with other major EU initiatives, such as Research and Technology Infrastructure Strategy, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and the European Health Data Space (EHDS) and others to ensure coherence across initiatives and cross-cutting domains.
At the EU Life Science Summit in Copenhagen, the focus was on how to put the Strategy into practice. Participants discussed key aspects of the strategy and proposed innovative solutions, which were later presented to the European Commission. I had the honor of chairing one of the sessions, where we proposed the idea of a European Body for Health and Life Sciences to better connect existing EU efforts, key actors, and policy makers across Europe. What was clear from the discussions is that Europe has the ideas, the expertise, and the people, now it is about connecting them and making things happen.
Looking ahead, what role can the ERIC Forum play in supporting ERICs focused on life sciences?
The ERIC Forum will play an important role in putting the Choose Europe for Life Sciences Strategy into practice. It will help coordinate the input of Europe’s ERICs, align their activities with the Strategy’s priorities, and provide a channel for dialogue between research infrastructures, policymakers, and the European Commission. As coordinator of the ERIC Forum, BBMRI-ERIC will help steer this joint effort and ensure that the collective expertise of ERICs is fully reflected in the Strategy’s implementation, driving real progress and helping to position Europe at the forefront of global life-science research and innovation.
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