This Friday December 4, 2020 Emmanuel Macron and Frédérique Vidal are visiting the Institut Imagine – the genetic disease research center set in the Necker hospital. They present their latest project: the creation of a national infectious and emerging disease research agency. This new player in the fight against those diseases is expected to be created for January 2021.
The Ministry of Higher Education and Research explains the goal of this project is “to improve research, understand how these diseases emerge, to know how to cure them and be here in the event of a new health crisis”.
According to 20 Minutes, this new agency is expected to gather together “the National Agency for AIDS Research (ANRS) and the REACting consortium coordinating research on health crisis related to emerging infectious diseases (chikungunya, Ebola… and Covid-19).”
Furthermore, the French President makes the most of his visit at the Necker hospital to announce the launch of the “Paris Campus Santé”, a place enabling to create a digital health sector and “make of France a world leader” in this field.
Debuting in 2021, Paris Campus Santé will be set in Paris. Yet, the goal is to gather together the different facilities involved at the Val-de-Grâce, the former military hospital. There will be the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), the INSERM (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research), the AP-HP, the Health ministry digital agency, and the Health Data Hub, the French health data hub using artificial intelligence.
Works to create this place will end in “5 years’ time”. Libération newspaper reports the total cost of this operation is estimated at €400 million, 50% of which being from public funds. Therefore, €45 million come from the 2021 recovery scheme and about 180 million from the Research Programming Act passed in mid-November by the Parliament. Moreover, the government is still thinking about finding “a specialist entrusted with the managing of the site that will remain a property of the State”.
