About us
- Name: INSERM – Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (French National Institute for Health and Medical Research)
- Country: France
- Creation date: 1964
- Status: Public scientific and technical research institution
- Number of employees/volunteers: 15 000
- Annual budget: €967.36 M
Our vision
- A large community at INSERM is dedicated to oncology, with 33 units and 161 teams attached to its Thematic Institute for Cancer (3,800 staff in all professions and supervisory bodies combined), i.e. 14% of INSERM-approved research teams.
- Over the last ten years, INSERM and its partners (CNRS and universities) have been engaged in an unparalleled effort to structure cancer research in France by consolidating and merging units within research centres. INSERM liaises with most of the Unicancer cancer centres, and works alongside INCa on the Cancer
Plans: nearly 50 calls for projects and more than 600 projects have been funded in ten years. These calls cover interdisciplinary programmes that diversify the avenues explored by fundamental research and attract researchers from disciplines other than biology. - Together with INCa, INSERM participates in the financing of integrated research sites providing new operational conditions for translational research.
- This is accompanied by the involvement of clinical investigation centres supervised by INSERM and the French Ministry for Health, some of which have been INCa-approved as early-phase centres providing access to innovative drugs for patients.
Our contribution
THE PLACE OF FRENCH CANCER RESEARCH IN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION
KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION
- France is ranked amongst the top countries for cancer research:
➔ 8th in the world for the number of publications on cancer with almost 10,000 scientific papers;
➔ 3rd in the world for the percentage of publications in the top 1% of the most cited papers.
RESEARCH EXPLOITATION
- Regular and successful industrial transfers have been recorded in the cancer field:
➔ France is the 6th-largest producer of cancer-related inventions;
➔ France is the 10th most specialised country in the cancer field – above the world average. - France is also ranked highly for international co-invention patents, in association with European countries such as Switzerland, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain.
- French specialisation has been changing over the past few years: medical and surgical devices and molecular analysis technologies are becoming the dominant specialities.
Our areas of intervention
INSERM: science for health
- INSERM is the body for biomedical research in France, under the supervision of the Ministry for Solidarity and Health and the Ministry for Higher Education, Research and Innovation.
- It manages 300 research laboratories and clinical investigation centres, in close collaboration with other public or private research institutions and hospitals. Nine thematic institutes are responsible for managing and coordinating research, and twelve regional delegations oversee scientific activity at regional level.
- In line with its motto: «Science for health», INSERM’s remit is to carry out and coordinate research on human health, and on means of intervention to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases and their consequences, and to improve the health status of the population.
Its missions revolve around five priorities:
➔ Participating in the national coordination of health research. INSERM has been entrusted with numerous missions to manage and coordinate health plans such as the French Genomic Medicine Plan 2025, and the Priority Research Programme on Antimicrobial Resistance. INSERM is involved in controlling emerging infectious diseases, notably through its internal agency ANRS/MIE, which has played an active role in tackling the health crisis linked to the COVID-19 pandemic;
➔ Producing and disseminating scientific knowledge at national and international levels for the benefit of everyone’s health;
➔ Promoting discoveries and their applications; making its scientific expertise available to public decision-makers and assisting with decision-making in health matters;
➔ Supporting higher education and training for research. - INSERM is Europe’s leading institution for health research in terms of publications and patents, and the second largest in the world after the NIH in the United States. On the international scene, INSERM partners the foremost institutions involved in the challenges and advances of biomedical science. Since its creation, INSERM has been a breeding ground for decisive medical
breakthroughs such as the first prenatal diagnostic tests, the mechanisms of the HLA histocompatibility system, in vitro fertilisation, the identification of HIV, radiotherapy cancer treatments, skin grafting, deep brain stimulation and gene therapy. INSERM boasts two Nobel prizes and three Lasker prizes – further reflections of its excellence