Today marks the official conclusion of RaDAR-PPI, a project that set out in January 2022 with an ambitious premise: that public buyers from different European countries could come together, pool their procurement power, and jointly drive the market towards innovative solutions for one of public health’s most persistent threats: antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Over fifty-four months, public buyers from Spain, France, and Italy worked side by side with research institutions, healthcare providers, and innovation experts to test whether Public Procurement of Innovation (PPI) could be applied at scale, across borders, to a problem that respects no borders of its own. AMR causes an estimated 35,000 deaths every year in Europe alone, and the World Health Organization counts it among the most pressing global health challenges of our time. RaDAR’s wager was that procurement could become a genuine engine of innovation in the fight against it.
Looking back, the scale of what the consortium built is considerable. Four Calls for Tenders were launched and brought to completion across the partner countries, supported by a dedicated procurement hub on the project website, informational videos for each call, and SME guides published in five languages. Along the way, the project engaged with its community through more than one hundred LinkedIn posts, a Forum of Interest that grew to over 150 members, and a monthly newsletter that consistently achieved open rates double the industry average. A six-episode animated series, RaDAR Collab, took the project’s core concepts and made them accessible to audiences far beyond the world of public procurement specialists.
But perhaps the truest measure of the project’s reach lies in its events calendar: nearly fifty conferences, workshops, market consultations, and stakeholder meetings across three and a half years, from Lisbon to Munich, from Naples to Brussels. RaDAR’s voice was present at every major European congress on clinical microbiology and infectious diseases during the project’s lifetime, and its local events brought the conversation directly to healthcare communities in Catalonia, the Basque Country, Naples, and Paris. The project’s Final Event, held in Brussels in May 2026, brought this journey full circle, gathering the broader stakeholder community one last time to take stock of what had been achieved and to look ahead to what comes next.
That “what comes next” is, in many ways, the project’s most important legacy. RaDAR generated thirteen Key Exploitable Results spanning clinical diagnostics, digital surveillance infrastructure, procurement methodology, and policy guidance — outputs designed from the outset to outlive the project itself. The Value-Based Cross-Border Collaborative PPI Handbook, developed with AQuAS and the full consortium, exists precisely so that other European public buyers do not have to start from zero. The One Health Approach report, produced by INSERM, has already informed policy dialogue through the EU Health Policy Platform. And to ensure none of this work simply disappears when the project website eventually goes offline, the consortium has spent recent months migrating its public outputs to Zenodo, the EU-endorsed open-access repository, so that RaDAR’s contribution to the field remains permanently citable and accessible.
There is something fitting about a project on antimicrobial resistance choosing not to let its own results expire. AMR will not be solved within the lifetime of a single EU-funded initiative, and RaDAR’s organisers have always understood that. What the project leaves behind is not a finished solution, but a tested model, a demonstration that cross-border PPI in healthcare is not merely a theoretical instrument, but a workable one, with real suppliers, real tenders, and real adoption to show for it.
To everyone who took part – the public buyers who took the procurement risk, the suppliers who answered the call, the researchers who lent their expertise, and the wider community who followed along through our channels – thank you. RaDAR-PPI may be closing today, but the model it built, the relationships it formed, and the knowledge it generated are designed to keep working long after this final newsletter goes out.
