Building indicators to assess the impact of EU-funded research into Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer and prostate cancer

Biomedical research is extremely resource intensive, thus monitoring its outputs and impacts can be considered a priority to gain an understanding of the most productive research avenues worth investing in.
For this reason, in 2019 the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the EC through the European Union Reference Laboratory for Alternatives to Animal Testing (EURL- ECVAM) initiated a project aiming to define suitable and reliable indicators to assess the contribution to innovation and the impact of EU-funded research into three biomedical research areas: Alzheimer’s disease (AD), breast cancer (BC) and prostate cancer (PC). Such diseases are of high prevalence, representing a heavy societal and economic burden for Europe, and have attracted a big share of the investments made through several EC funding programmes.
A set of fourteen indicators was built, covering different scientific and societal aspects. This report provides details on the methodology used to select, refine and implement these indicators, and also gives an overview of the type of knowledge they can generate through an integrated analysis applied to the abovementioned biomedical research areas. Lastly, a quality assessment of these indicators highlights their strengths and weaknesses to allow a transparent use of the information contained within them.