A new European network for life sciences-related nanotechnology, funded by a €5 million grant from the European Commission (EC), is being launched today (August 23).

The network is made up of a consortium of 12 nanotechnology institutes and plans to integrate 192 researchers and staff in the next 4 years. Scientists are meeting at the University of Twente in the Netherlands to establish committees and set up research collaborations, with three research clusters already in motion, for nano-bio interfacing, fabrication of single molecules and nanoclusters, and life science nanotechnology applications.

"The advantage of the network is how it will fight the fragmentation of European research as it is currently carried out," Jan-Willem Weener, program manager of the network, called Frontiers, told The Scientist. "The key word is integration—in research, education, laboratory facilities, and other areas—while at the same time ensuring the knowledge generated in the network eventually ends up in applications."

"It's an impressive lineup of top-quality partners. They're definitely bringing together top organizations in Europe in nanotechnology research," said Ottilia Saxl, chief executive officer of the Institute of Nanotechnology.

The consortium is meant to strengthen Europe's nanotechnology stance to better compete with its main nanotechnology competitors, the United States and Japan, Weener said. The EC reported in May that the European Union (EU) was investing proportionately less than the United States and Japan and recommended tripling overall public EU nanotechnology research and development investment by 2010.

One of the crucial differences the EC noted in its May report between the EU and its main competitors was that the latter had coordinated nanotechnology research and development programs, whereas European research was scattered.

"The network will help share expertise. One cannot be an expert in all fields at the same time, especially in nanotechnology," Weener said. "In the network, every partner will have certain core activities." By dividing up labor in research collaborations, he said, "every partner can spend more time on their core activities and less time on the peripheral activities, due to the fact that one or more of a member's peripheral activities are probably the core activity of another partner group."

In addition, Frontiers will set up a virtual European nanosciences laboratory to share equipment, "a database that makes available lists of equipment at different institutes, and also rules for sharing equipment," Weener said.

Catherine Lewis, chief of the US National Institute of General Medical Sciences biophysics branch in Bethesda, Md., said the collaborations the network is drawing up were a good idea. "Larger, collaborative groups are becoming more common in US projects. Pooling resources may reduce costs in terms of technical support, instrumentation, redundancy in goals, sharing of data," she told The Scientist.

Saxl, whose advocacy group is not affiliated with Frontiers, noted other such multidisciplinary collaborations in Europe were proving successful. "In Grenoble, you see this kind of thing, where electronics companies work with life sciences researchers working with hospitals, and the results are applied on new techniques for everything from Alzheimer's to Parkinson's," she told The Scientist. "With this consortium, I'm quite convinced the outcome will be most exciting."

The consortium will also develop a joint curriculum on life sciences–related nanotechnology from educational material at each of the different partners. "We want to try and construct one international European masters program in the area of nanotechnology," Weener said. "In the future, students at the University of Cambridge might follow a course in Chalmers or Aarhus, or professors could go to give lectures. The money to pay for traveling would be covered by the grant."

Other considerations include a focus on gender issues to increase the number of women scientists working in the field, external communications with the media to popularize research, and an ethics monitoring board that includes university experts already involved in the ethical aspects of nanotechnology to set up rules, guidelines, and risk assessment procedures.

In addition, Frontiers will set up a science-to-industry task force "that has one main goal—to make sure knowledge generated in the network ends up in real-life applications," Weener said. The network will create joint partnerships with small- and medium-sized enterprises and industry as well as an intellectual property rights working group. An applications committee, with members typically with an industrial or clinical background, "will also help provide research directions for the future," he said.