[Medicen Paris Région: A world-class ''competitiveness cluster'' in the Paris region incorporating a neuroscience ''subcluster''].

The French public-private partnerships known as "competitive clusters" [pôles de compétitivité (PdC)] are intended to be novel and ambitious engines of regional growth, employment and biomedical innovation. Partly funded by government and local councils, they aim to capitalize on regional expertise by bringing together basic scientists, clinicians, innovative entrepreneurs and local decision-makers around specific themes that have become too costly and complex for any of these actors to tackle alone. Clusters provide the critical mass required both to underpin innovation potential and to authenticate regional claims to international competitiveness. Medicen is a biomedicine and therapeutics cluster comprising 120 partners from four broad "colleges" in the greater Paris region: major industry, small and medium-sized businesses, teaching hospitals/State research bodies, and local councils. Chief among its cooperative R&D projects is the neuroscience subcluster, in which "TransAl" the neurodegenerative disease project, counts Sanofi-Aventis, Servier and the French Atomic Energy Commission [Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA)] as key partners. One main aim is to develop an experimental model in rhesus monkeys in which a putative cause of Alzheimer's disease, intracerebral accumulation of b-amyloid peptide, is generated by impairing the peptide's clearance. The other aim, in which the nuclear medicine expertise of the CEA will be crucial, is to identify, characterize and validate markers for magnetic resonance and positron emission tomography imaging, and to source biomarkers from cerebrospinal fluid proteomics. A human biological resource centre (DNA and tissue banks) project dedicated to neurological and psychiatric disease should be up and running in 2007. Only through fundamental restructuring of resources on such a large cooperative scale are solutions likely to be found to the major problems of modern medicine, bringing healthcare and regional socioeconomic benefits in its wake.