Marine Biotechnology ERA-NET

The Marine Biotechnology ERA-NET (ERA-MarineBiotech) recognises that Europe’s marine ecosystems and organisms are largely unexplored, understudied and underutilized, in spite of Europe’s access to an extensive and diverse set of marine ecosystems, supporting an enormous marine biodiversity. This resource, through the coordinated application of marine biotechnology, has the potential to provide a major contribution towards addressing some of the most pressing societal challenges including environmental degradation, human health and delivering sustainable supplies of food and energy, amongst others regarded as the Grand Challenges for our future.

The vision of the ERA-MBT project is to support Europe’s marine biotechnology community to participate in a lasting enterprise-driven network that adds value to marine biological resources in ways that nurture and sustain the lives of European citizens.

The ERA-MarineBiotech is therefore designed to deliver better coordination of relevant national and regional Research, Technology, Development and Innovation (RTDI) programmes in Europe, reducing fragmentation and duplication, and paving the way for common programmes and cooperation in the provision and use of research infrastructures. A necessity to make sustainable use of this unique resource.

ERA-MarineBiotech's 19 partners from 14 countries will work with stakeholders from industry and organisations to identify needs and gaps in the value chain from research and development, through optimising research results for proof of concept and industrial uptake and valorisation.

The ERA-NET MarineBiotech will build on the achievements of the CSA MarineBiotech.

At least three transnational calls will address these challenges, and cooperation with complementing activities will be explored to add value and power to enable the development of a horizontally applicable technology like marine biotechnology.