At the project inception phase, the large majority of diseases could only be treated with medical products distributing the drug throughout the entire human body. The aim of Site Drug was to develop innovative drug products, which are able to control the resulting drug distribution in the patient’s body. The drug amount at the site of action was to be optimized, and the amount that is “lost” into the rest of the human body was to be minimized. This achievement was foreseen to take place thanks to «site-specific delivery systems”, which release the drug at a controlled rate at the site of action. Thus, the therapeutic efficacy is improved and undesired side effects reduced. This helps reducing the current cost burden on our healthcare systems due to adverse drug effects. The latter are estimated at 79 billion EUR/year in Europe, equivalent to 3.1 billion EUR/year in the 2 Seas area. Also, two hundred thousand deaths are caused by adverse drug effects in Europe/year (equivalent to 8,000 in the 2 Seas area). The diseases/disorders Site Drug was targeting affect more than 60 million citizens in Europe (> 2.3 million in the 2 Seas area), whose quality of life is to be improved.

Partners jointly expressed that none of them would have been able to conduct the project on its own (or in collaboration with national partners). The critical mass needed to unite the required spectrum of knowhow, facilities, theoretical and experimental techniques as well as long term experience could only be reached by the cross-border collaboration of the consortium partners, providing very different and complementary knowledge & competences. This includes cutting edge skills in the fields of pharmaceutical and medical sciences, (micro)biology, physics, chemistry, (bio)engineering and patient care (hospitals).

Importantly, partners provide the required knowhow, equipment, and facilities to manufacture innovative implants for site-specific drug delivery, test new prototypes, scale-up the production, and translate the obtained new knowledge into practical applications. Without this cross-border cooperation, the highly interdisciplinary and complementary cluster of Universities, SMEs, technology transfer accelerators and hospitals could not have been formed in this unique field of cutting-edge healthcare research & development.  Importantly, the obstacle to be overcome is located at the frontier of various scientific disciplines. This substantially hampers science to advance in this field of great practical importance for our society.

The highly complementary project partners have intensively interacted with each other: The Universities of Lille, Ghent, Delft & London as well as a French SME (Lattice Medical) have produced different prototypes, which have been characterized by the Universities of Cambridge and Leiden as well as a Belgium SME (ProDigest). The medical doctors at the Lille Hospital have provided highly valuable feedback on the suitability of the innovative drug products, and the technology transfer office SATT Nord in France has coordinated the valorisation of the obtained results. The innovative drug products could only be developed by the joint cross-border efforts.