In the European Union, health is a responsibility of each individual Member State and EU action generally only complements national policies by facilitating cooperation between Member States, providing funding for health related projects, supporting broad programmes to raise awareness, and so on. However, in a few very specific areas, the EU has a clear mandate to legislate as is the case of measures dealing with the quality and safety of organs and substances of human origin – a very important area in Kidney Health. Please go to the Organ Donation and Transplantation section to learn more.
As of yet there are no specific EU policies or strategies addressing Kidney Disease, nor for Chronic Non-communicable Diseases (see section Chronic Diseases, below), as there are for Cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease. However, work to influence this is on-going and there have been a number of EU-funded projects addressing Kidney Disease and Kidney Transplantation. Examples include:
EUROSTAM a Europe-wide strategy to enhance transplantation of highly sensitized patients on basis of acceptable HLA mismatches BIO-Drim Biomarker-driven personalised immunosuppression The ONE Study a unified approach to evaluating cellular immunotherapy in solid organ transplantation BIOMARGIN Discovering and validating robust non-invasive biomarkers for the follow up of renal grafts STELLAR Stem cell therapy for kidney repair SYSKID Systems Biology towards novel chronic kidney disease diagnosis and treatment COPE Consortium for organ preservation in Europe