The Luxembourg Health Sciences and Technologies Plan

With the development of the Lisbon Strategy in 2000, the European Union (EU) invited its member states to “become the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world.”

Luxembourg responded to this challenge with the development of “The Luxembourg Health Sciences and Technologies Plan”. The aim is to transform the country into a research and technology hub for the EU and beyond.

Focusing on the Health Sciences, Luxembourg is making significant investments in research and development, hoping to support innovation and commercialization of diagnostic and therapeutic tools. These developments should help to diversify the economy and to stimulate related business activities.

As part of the initiative, the Government will invest approximately 140 million euros over the next five years as it aims to develop a centre of expertise in the area of molecular medicine.
In carrying out this initiative, the Government counts on the support of the Public Research Centers (CRP), Santé, Henri Tudor and Gabriel Lippmann, in addition to the University of Luxembourg, all of which were closely involved in the setting-up phase.

As the first step in actualizing its Plan, the Luxembourg Government has decided to collaborate with three world-renowned researchers:

• Dr. Leroy Hood, M.D., Ph.D., of the Institute for Systems Biology (Seattle, Washington): http://www.systemsbiology.org/
• Dr. Leland Hartwell, Ph.D., of the Partnership for Personalized Medicine (Phoenix, Arizona): www.ibbl.lu/
• Dr. Jeffrey Trent, Ph.D., of the Translational Genomics Research Institute (Phoenix, Arizona): http://www.tgen.org/

The centrepiece of the overall project is the creation in 2009 of a Luxembourg “biobank”, in partnership with the Translational Genomics Research Institute, under the name the Integrated BioBank of Luxembourg (IBBL).

The second part of the agreement deals with a partnership between the Institute for Systems Biology and the University of Luxembourg. The project aims to establish at the University of Luxembourg, in collaboration with the Public Research Centres, the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) , which focuses on the analysis of biological mechanisms with a special emphasis on disease development. The LCSB has been founded end of 2009.