The European Commission recently presented its ambitious proposal for the EU's next Multiannual Financial Framework 2028-2034, a roadmap for Europe's investment priorities up to 2034, with a proposed total budget of €1,630 billion and multiple opportunities for healthcare innovators.
The new framework's health priorities
The 2028-2034 roadmap highlights several key healthcare priorities, aligned with evolving European needs:
- Health, biotechnology and the bioeconomy
- Regenerative therapies and advanced biomedicine
- Artificial intelligence applications in healthcare
- Data sovereignty and secure spaces for healthcare data
- Global health and environmental determinants
Horizon Europe budget and pillars
Within this framework, Horizon Europe will remain the flagship program for research and innovation, with a substantial budget of €175 billion, an 83% increase on the 2021-2027 budget.
Horizon Europe is built around four complementary pillars, each supporting innovation at different levels of maturity:
- Pillar 1: Scientific excellence (44.079 billion euros, an increase of 76% on the 2021-2027 program)
- Funding for exploratory research and basic science, targeting early-stage and breakthrough innovations.
- Pillar 2: Global challenges and European industrial competitiveness (75.876 billion euros, an increase of 41.8% on the 2021-2027 program)
- Focuses on applied research and development to address societal challenges and increase Europe's global competitiveness in innovation; includes health-related missions and technologies.
- Pillar 3: Innovative Europe (38.785 billion euros, an increase of 184.8% on the 2021-2027 program)
- Supports the scaling-up and deployment of innovations through the European Innovation Council, targeting high-potential start-ups and SMEs to bridge the gap between research and commercialization.
- Pillar 4: Broadening participation and strengthening the European Research Area (16.262 billion euros, an increase of 378.5% on the 2021-2027 program)
- Strengthen collaboration and capacity building between EU member states to ensure that all regions benefit from innovation activities.
Moonshot Projects
In addition, Horizon Europe will develop a new financial support tool, the "Moonshot Projects", to accelerate the transition of innovations from research to testing and then to the real world. These projects will be supported by joint funding from the EU (Horizon Europe and the European Competitiveness Fund), and from national public and private sources.
These projects will promote the following health-related areas:
- Regenerative therapies
- Next-generation AI and data sovereignty
- Applications of space research to healthcare
Get a head start with Eurobiomed
Start aligning your strategy now:
- Map your innovation against key priority areas
- Identify potential partners in the European cluster network
- Get ready to commit as soon as the first calls are announced
- Stay tuned for a series of webinars to share the latest EU news with our members
To get personalized advice, build partnerships and strategically align your projects as the next Multiannual Financial Framework takes shape, contact Marwa Elrefaey-Katz, Eurobiomed's Europe Officer.
