The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), Germany will soon initiate joint Research and Development (R&D) project in the fields of common interest in health research, especially in the national priority areas in health research and biomedicine sciences like oncology, regenerative medicine, neurosciences and infectious diseases.

The Indo-German cooperation in health research comes under the agreement of Indo-German cooperation in S&T of 1974 and the ICMR-GSF special arrangement of 1976 further renewed in 1990 with the addendum of ICMR-IB/BMBF at DLR of 2005. The purpose of the cooperation is to stimulate new collaborations, e.g. the preparation of joint projects under national funding programmes. The programme facilitates bilateral cooperation between the scientific communities of India and Germany by way of joint research projects, bilateral workshops/seminar, exchange visits of scientists, scientific delegations and composite (scientific and industrial) delegation. Both sides will explore the possibility of funding from European Union research programmes.

It is expected that the funded cooperation enables the partners to develop applicable scientific results which could be commercialised and may lead to formation of joint ventures. All publications, patents coming out of these projects, need to be jointly authored by both Indian and German scientists. All necessary approvals like ethical clearance, HMSC approval from Indian point of view as well as EU if, applicable, from German point of view, e.g. before conducting animal experimentation if any needs to be obtained by PI´s before undertaking the project.

The ICMR has invited proposals for the projects from scientists of both the public sector and private sector. Scientists or faculty members working in regular capacity in universities, national R&D laboratories or institutes and private R&D institutes can participate in this programme.

For the private sector, partners from all kinds of private sectors can participate in the programme, but financing is limited. For Indian scientists from the private sector, only local hospitality in Germany as part of the exchange visit is available from the German side. For German scientists from private sector, only travel costs are available for small and medium size enterprises (for definition of SME ref. to 2003/361/EC) as well as local hospitality in India will be borne by themselves.