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EU funding found to have led to over 2,700 Covid papers so far

    

Analysis finds that 80 per cent of publications were supported by three major funding schemes

More than 2,700 scientific papers related to Covid-19 have been supported by EU funding, according to an analysis carried out for the European Commission.

Commission policy analyst Alexis-Michel Mugabushaka studied the extent to which EU R&D funding—mainly allocated before Covid-19 arose—contributed to the scientific effort to combat the pandemic. Such efforts have included work to characterise the virus, track its spread and develop mitigating technologies.

The recognition of the pandemic in early 2020 led to a ramping up of funding from different EU programmes. For instance, a €50 million emergency call for coronavirus research was launched under the Horizon 2020 R&D programme on 30 January 2020.

But researchers and innovators who have gained prominence during the pandemic have repeatedly stressed the importance of long-term public funding of R&D to the scientific efforts to combat the pandemic. For example, Uğur Şahin, the chief executive of the healthcare company BioNTech, has said that the development of the technology used in its Covid-19 vaccine was made possible in part by support from several EU R&D programmes over many years.

Years of work

In a paper published by the Commission on 15 December, Mugabushaka reported finding 2,721 Covid-related papers linked to EU funding, using the Cord-19 dataset of Covid-19 publications.

His study focused on the 2007-13 and 2014-20 EU R&D programmes, Framework 7 and Horizon 2020. It identified 15 relevant papers in 2009 rising gradually to 182 in 2019 before almost half of the identified papers, 1,277, were published in 2020.

Among the papers studied, 80 per cent were funded through three schemes: the European Research Council, health-focused instruments and the Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions. The EU was the sole funder for around a third of the roughly 1,400 papers for which full funding information was available.

Impact factor

Given how recently the pandemic started, it is too early to make full assessments of how impactful publications have been. But Mugabushaka singled out several major advances supported by EU funding, including the development of the first diagnostic tool and the discovery of at least two neutralising antibodies against the Covid-19 virus.

His paper also noted that by January 2021 the European Investment Bank had backed dozens of companies developing vaccines, drugs and diagnostic tests, including BioNTech.