The European Advanced Translational Research InfraStructure in Medicine, EATRIS, aims at advancing translational science in Europe by providing infrastructure to allow a faster and more efficient transfer of research discoveries into new products to prevent, diagnose or treat diseases.

Challenges in Healthcare

Throughout Europe, there is an increasing incidence of cancer, cardiovascular and other diseases like Alzheimer due to higher life expectancy and changes in life style. At the same time the pressure on health care budgets and medical services has risen significantly. Therefore, it is essential to develop new innovative, cost-effective technologies, products and treatment options for patients. In order to generate such new solutions, basic research results have to be “translated” into clinical applications. But still biomedical research discoveries stay too often in labs and journals instead of resulting in groundbreaking new therapies and diagnostics. The understanding in the biology of human diseases increased remendously in recent years but exploiting this potential has been much more difficult than expected.

Advancing Discoveries into Applications

It is against this background that European governments and leading centres in translational biomedical research have come together to create EATRIS as an infrastructure to support the biomedical scientists in “translating” their research findings and to increase the number of innovative new medicinal products. Giving pan-European access to translational experience and to powerful translational infrastructures will not only lead to a better health care provision but will also bridge between countries of different translational capacity and make Europe more competitive.

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