BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Med.
Sec. Regulatory Science
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmed.2025.1599997
The route to financial sustainability of a large Public Private Partnership -the example of the clinical trial network conect4children (c4c)
Provisionally accepted
Laetitia Paumard1*
Marianne Engel1
Pirkko Lepola2
Esther Montero3Frank Tennigkeit4
Heidrun Hildebrand5
Magda Rosenmoller1- 1IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain
- 2Helsinki University Hospital and the University of Helsinki, Finland, Helsinki, Finland
- 3Servizo Galego de Saúde (SERGAS), Galicia, Spain
- 4UCB BioSciences, Monheim, Germany
- 5Bayer AG, Research & Development Pharmaceuticals, Pediatric Medicine, Berlin, Germany
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The financial sustainability of publicly funded initiatives, particularly Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), is crucial for ensuring the intended long-term impact beyond the project's funding phase. Despite many initiatives aspiring to lasting impact, very few practical examples and little evidence are available on successful financial sustainability strategies, and even fewer are available on the path to achieve the financial autonomy of any successor organisation. This paper intends to shed light on this aspect by exploring the strategy and challenges towards the financial sustainability of conect4children (c4c), an Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI)-funded PPP establishing a pan-European paediatric clinical trial network to facilitate and support the planning and conduct of paediatric clinical trials.The c4c project was planned for a lasting impact from the start. An entire work package dedicated to financial sustainability was already sketched in the proposal and started from the onset of the project, including benchmarking against clinical trial networks globally, needs assessment leading to a value proposition, service portfolio definition, analysis of legal requirements, and the development of a sound business concept.c4c adopted a combined approach, translating research findings into market-tested services through the parallel set-up of a standalone entity, c4c-Stichting (c4c-s). This strategy offers valuable insights into planning financial sustainability for similar large-scale initiatives and, more broadly, provides a significant contribution to the discourse on financial sustainability. These insights are highly relevant to Regulatory Science, as the sustainability of such infrastructures is critical to the success of regulatory science strategy and long-term public health outcomes.
Keywords: Financial sustainability strategy, Public Private Partnerships, Paediatric clinical trials, Clinical trial network, conect4children, Business school
Received: 25 Mar 2025; Accepted: 10 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Paumard, Engel, Lepola, Montero, Tennigkeit, Hildebrand and Rosenmoller. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Laetitia Paumard, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.