In late April, the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic had announced a new public call within the Programme of support of applied health research 2024–2030, in particular its Subprogramme 4: Support of national authorities in priority areas of healthcare research. This call attracted extraordinary interest not only within our national institute but in all EXCELES programmes. The reason is clear: after the end of the special support from the National Plan of Renewal, large research infrastructures and networks are entering a period of sustainability. During that time, they will have to meet their sustainability commitments whose indicators are codified in a partnership agreement but, at the same time, also search for new models of long-term stability, coordination, and representation with respect to both the state and international partners.
The call is focused on period 2026–2030 and its ambition is to support long-term functioning of national expert platforms dedicated to healthcare research, whereby the planned project duration is 53 months (1 August 2026 – 31 December 2030). On the other hand, it needs to be stressed – and I am very sorry to have to say it – that this call is not primarily intended for financing research as such. Unlike other calls issued by Czech Health Research Council or other providers, this one does not enable standard grant support of research projects, experimental work, and publications. It is aimed mainly at coordination, organisation, strategic, and integration activities, in other words activities which play a crucial role in the functioning of large networks but traditional grant mechanisms support them only to a small extent or not at all.
The project period had proven the importance of NICR as an established national platform. In recent years, we have managed to create a functional network connecting universities, institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and indirectly also university hospitals, centres of comprehensive cancer care, and other partners across the Czech Republic. NICR did not bring ‘only’ a large number of high-quality publications, new technologies, and grant successes. What was crucial was the creation of a ‘microenvironment’ of academic oncology, where individual groups and institutions started – and that can be demonstrated by bibliometrics – notably more cooperate, share infrastructures, prepare joint projects, attract international colleagues, and coordinate strategic priorities of Czech oncology.
It is positive that, in the past several years, we have managed to establish NICR as a respected partner for numerous national and European activities. The network is now interconnected with European infrastructures and initiatives, its members participate in expert discussions about strategies of cancer research, and it functions as a platform for the formation of new international collaborations. On top of that, it had become apparent that such coordinated approach considerably increases the external visibility of Czech oncology.
This type of ‘network effect’ is often hard to measure by common scientometric indicators but, from a long-term perspective, it can be crucial. To wit, we can observe – both on a national and international level – a growing emphasis on coordinated national authorities and consolidated research ecosystems. Both the state authorities and support providers prefer partners who can represent a wider community, formulate strategic priorities, organise collaboration across institutions, but also address the general public and cooperate with the state authorities.
The new call is therefore not just an administrative episode after the ending of the project phase of the EXCELES programme. It is actually an important test of the ability to maintain the continuity of newly created structures and transfer it into the next stage of development. For NICR, it is also an opportunity to demonstrate that the network it built was not just a one-off project linked to a particular source of financing, that is did become a stable part of Czech cancer research environment.
The level of interest this call had attracted also among other EXCELES projects moreover shows that sustainability of large research consortia will be, in the coming years, one of the key areas of Czech research policy. NICR enters this discussion from the position of project with high evaluation marks, one that has been able to link excellent science, clinical relevance, functional coordination of a large community of experts, and society-wide social relevance. That is why the sustainability of NICR is important also over and above the framework of EXCELES project. Preservation of a functional oncology network can, in the future, importantly influence our ability to not only acquire further resources but even to modulate the settings of funding programmes and support mechanisms related to cancer research.
In other words: entities capable of representing, in the long run, a consolidated national environment will be able to significantly co-determine the shape of future programmes. And, to be quite frank, that’s what we’ve been trying our best to do.
Aleksi Šedo, NICR Director