Earlier this year, a group of independent European RNA companies has launched the European RNA Alliance (ERA), an initiative to strengthen Europe’s position in RNA technologies and improve access to high-quality solutions developed, produced, operated and supported in Europe, a conscious choice for Made-in-Europe innovation.
RNA technologies are increasingly central to modern medicine: diagnostics, disease monitoring, prophylaxis, therapeutics, and personalized treatment.
Founding members (listed alphabetically) are: Anemocyte S.r.l., Genevia Technologies Oy, Immagina Biotechnology S.r.l., Lexogen GmbH, MultiplexDX s.r.o., siTOOLS Biotech GmbH, TAmiRNA GmbH.
For a closer look at the consortium’s role and activities, we spoke with Nicola Conci, Consortium Coordinator (European RNA Alliance).
What are the European RNA Alliance’s key focus areas?
The main focus of the European RNA Alliance (ERA) is to support researchers and the scientific community by making innovative European RNA technologies, expertise and services more visible, accessible and easier to combine. By bringing together complementary European companies, we aim to help researchers identify the right solutions for their projects and benefit from unmatched expertise and support across different areas of RNA research.
Our members cover different stages of RNA research and applications, from nucleic acid synthesis and RNA sequencing to bioinformatics, data analysis and RNA-based diagnostics. They also work across research fields such as gene silencing and translatomics.
Our goal is not simply to offer a larger catalogue of products and services, but to combine complementary technologies and expertise from different companies to provide solutions tailored to each project’s needs. We also want to encourage collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation within the RNA research community.
At the same time, ERA aims to increase the visibility and competitiveness of European RNA companies, giving them a stronger collective presence to compete with larger multinational players on the global market. As ERA grows, we plan to welcome new members with complementary expertise and progressively expand the range of solutions available to researchers and industry.
By supporting innovative European companies, ERA also helps preserve scientific expertise, skilled jobs and technological capabilities in Europe, contributing to Europe’s competitiveness and economy.
Ultimately, our ambition is simple: help researchers do better science, accelerate innovation and translate scientific progress into benefits for patients and society.
How do you envision a strong, future-ready European RNA ecosystem, and what does it take to make it a reality?
A strong European RNA ecosystem is first and foremost an environment in which Made-in-Europe products, services, and expertise are visible, known, and readily accessible to the entire scientific community. There are many companies operating in Europe that excel and innovate in their respective RNA research fields. However, these organizations often struggle to stay visible against larger global players while having more limited access to capital.
Here, the objective of ERA is twofold. First, we are building a platform where researchers can access the portfolios of our members all in one place, streamlining access to products and services for any RNA project. At the same time, we aim to make the scientific community aware of the many specialised companies operating in Europe.
In addition, we strive to increase the visibility of our member companies by representing one another at various conferences and events, and through joint marketing and outreach activities.
The ecosystem must then be collaborative: specialized companies, researchers, clinicians, and industry partners should work together to accelerate innovation and translate RNA science into practical solutions. And here I think we did something rarely seen in our industry: we stopped competing and instead started collaborating. Even where the products of our members do overlap, we do not try to convince customers that one is better than the other. Rather, we discuss together and try to identify the best solution for a particular project or experiment.
Europe is stepping up efforts to remove barriers and accelerate innovation. How much progress are we actually making?
Yes, initiatives from the European Commission, such as Choose Europe for Life Sciences, the Biotech Act, and the recent announcement of the Innovation Act, are all steps in the right direction, designed to address some of the main issues affecting innovation in Europe: access to capital, bureaucratic hurdles, and the ability of European companies, particularly SMEs, to compete fairly in their own market against much larger non-European players.
Europe has historically been much more risk-averse compared to other regions; a tendency clearly reflected in its investment ecosystem. Although several funding opportunities exist for early-stage ventures, options become severely limited when companies reach the stage where they need to scale up operations or go public, especially for enterprises whose primary value lies in intellectual property.
At the same time, European companies face increasingly strong competition from much larger international players, including companies from China and the US, which can use their scale, financial resources or public support to compete very aggressively on price. For innovative European SMEs, competing on price alone is often simply not sustainable.
Initiatives harmonizing and simplifying rules across procurement (with greater consideration for European innovation and quality rather than lowest price alone), IP evaluation, and clinical trials are all designed to make investing in European innovation significantly more attractive and to help European companies compete more fairly within the European market.
For those unfamiliar with the term, what exactly is translatomics?
Within the cell, there is often a mismatch between the abundance of an mRNA and the amount of its corresponding protein. A high abundance of a given mRNA does not guarantee high protein expression, and vice versa. This can be a significant issue when developing RNA therapeutics. A therapy aiming to stop the production of a protein by silencing its mRNA might not achieve sufficient protein reduction, despite strong mRNA knockdown. This phenomenon can be driven by multiple causes; for example, a cell can increase the rate at which a certain mRNA is translated to maintain protein expression levels.
Translatomics is the research field that aims to address these questions by exploring what happens during translation and how the process is affected by environmental factors or certain pathologies such as cancer. While translation research has been ongoing for decades, the origin of modern-day translatomics can be traced back to 2009 with Nicolas Ingolia’s publication describing Ribosome profiling (Ribo-Seq). For the first time, this technique made it possible to determine which RNAs are being translated and at what rate. Early on, it became clear that measurements from Ribo-Seq often did not correlate with traditional RNA-Seq data (the latter measuring how much mRNA is transcribed from DNA), while showing a much higher correlation with actual protein abundance. Ribo-Seq can therefore be combined with RNA-Seq to measure how efficiently each mRNA is translated into protein, giving a clearer picture of the pathways that drive a given phenotype. Several ERA members already provide complementary technologies in this field, including solutions for ribosome profiling, polysome profiling and RNA sequencing, allowing researchers to study both RNA abundance and its translation into proteins.
Another interesting discovery is that the number of proteins potentially produced by our cells may be much larger than previously thought. This gave rise to the concept of the dark proteome, which refers to all those proteins that are difficult to detect by standard methodologies. Many of these newly uncovered proteins are now being investigated as potential therapeutic candidates. The coming years promise to be an exceptionally exciting time for the field.
How is the RNA industry attracting the next generation of talent?
RNA research has expanded rapidly in recent years, driven largely by the breakthrough success and potential of mRNA therapeutics. From advanced gene-editing platforms and personalized cancer vaccines to new areas of biology such as the “dark proteome”, the field has broadened considerably, making it increasingly attractive to current and future generations of scientists. For the RNA industry, actively participating in the education and training of the next generation is crucial. Industry involvement in training consortia, for example the MSCA Doctoral Networks, is key to exposing early-career scientists to industrial research environments alongside academia, and to better preparing them for future challenges in RNA research. That is why all ERA members are eager to collaborate with universities and research institutions on educational and training initiatives. Some ERA members are also actively involved in Doctoral Networks.
