What Institut Pasteur's Grants Impact Report Tells Us About the Real Economics of Horizon Europe

By the Orientos team — May 2026

In December 2025, Institut Pasteur's Grants Office published its first Grants Impact Report covering 2019–2024. Reports like this are rare. Most institutions either don't measure grant impact systematically or keep the results internal. Pasteur did both the work and the publishing — and the document is unusually candid about what works, what doesn't, and what the structural constraints actually are.

We read it carefully. Here are the five things we think are worth pulling out, particularly for SMEs, mid-sized institutions, and consortium coordinators trying to calibrate what "good" looks like in EU research funding.

1. The benchmark numbers are sobering — and clarifying

Over six years, Pasteur submitted 512 proposals to EU programmes and won 147, for €112.5M direct to Pasteur teams. That's a 28.7% overall EU success rate. Their ERC success rate was 34% against a European average of 14%. Their MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship rate was 31% against an EU average of 15.6%.

These numbers represent what a top-tier institution achieves with a dedicated in-house Grants Office of roughly 25 people, organised into national, European, and international divisions, with specialist support for grant writing, outreach, advocacy, and innovation.

Why does this matter for everyone else? Because it sets a realistic ceiling. If you are competing against this kind of machinery without comparable infrastructure, your strategy cannot be "submit more proposals and hope the success rate averages out." It has to be sharper: targeted calls, strong consortium positioning, and either internal capacity or a partner who provides the writing and management discipline that closes the gap.

2. The indirect cost problem is real, and Pasteur said so out loud

This is the section of the report we found most striking. Pasteur publishes, in plain language, that:

• Public funders average 15.9% indirect cost recovery; private funders average 5.4%.

• Fellowships recover an average of 5.1% IDC; research grants recover 15.2%.

• Strategic disease areas — cancer (2.2%), neurology (3.6%), infectious diseases (3.8%), HIV/tuberculosis (3.9%), rare diseases (7.0%) — all run well below the institutional average of 16.7% for non-thematic calls.

The report then states what most grants offices privately know but rarely say publicly: a private non-profit research foundation cannot fund its strategic disease portfolio on overhead recovery alone. It requires deliberate cross-subsidy from higher-IDC projects, philanthropic partnerships explicitly covering overheads, and active advocacy with funders for fairer IDC policies.

For SMEs and smaller institutions, the lesson is not to copy Pasteur's portfolio mix — most cannot. The lesson is that overhead economics need to be modelled before, not after, a consortium commits to a thematic specialisation. If you are an RMA partner or a DC&E lead, this is also a sober reminder that your own indirect cost lines deserve attention in the budget negotiation, not whatever the call template defaults to.

3. Funder concentration is now openly framed as a strategic risk

Pasteur explicitly identifies "high concentration of financial support in a small number of funders, especially ANR" as a strategic vulnerability — language that would have been uncommon in an institutional report five years ago. They flag exposure to national policy and budget shifts, and signal that the recent NIH crisis will be addressed in the next report.

This matters because it normalises a conversation that has been quietly happening among research managers for some time. The Horizon Europe / national funder / large foundation triangle is not as stable as it looked in 2019. Every consortium and every institution should be asking: if our top funder cuts its budget by 30% next year, what does our pipeline look like?

The Pasteur report also flags an explicit move to diversify toward international foundations — Novo Nordisk Foundation is named — which is itself a useful signal about where the next wave of competition for tier-1 institutions is going.

4. Patents tell a quieter, more interesting story

Among 139 patent applications filed during the period, 57 cited any funding source, and only 34 (about one in four) cited grant funding specifically. Pasteur is unusually honest about why: most of their research is fundamental, declarations of invention are often filed years after the originating grant ended, and researchers may not recall every relevant funder.

This is worth noting because the dominant narrative around EU research funding — particularly under Horizon Europe's emphasis on impact — assumes a relatively direct line from grant to invention to patent to commercialisation. The Pasteur data suggests something messier: grants accumulate over years, support the broader research environment, and contribute to inventions that surface much later. That doesn't make grants less important. It makes simple "grants → patents" KPIs misleading on their own.

For consortia building exploitation strategies, this is a useful corrective. The honest story to tell funders is about the conditions for innovation rather than direct attribution.

5. Policy compliance is now an institutional asset — and a burden

The report devotes a full chapter to how funder requirements have driven Pasteur's policies on research integrity, ethics, data management, FAIR principles, biosecurity, gender equality plans (HRS4R), and sustainability (MSCA Green Charter). These are now competitive assets — institutions without them increasingly cannot bid for top-tier calls.

But Pasteur is also direct about the cost. They cite a specific case where the administrative burden of NIH Select Agents approval was so high that upper management now requires cost-benefit analysis before submitting future projects involving such agents. This is a remarkable thing for an institution to publish. It is also a reminder that compliance is not free, and consortia should plan for it as a real line item.

What this means if you are running or supporting EU projects

A few practical takeaways from our reading:

The first is that quality reporting on impact is itself a competitive advantage. Pasteur has now established a reproducible baseline. In two or three years, when they publish the next edition, they will be able to demonstrate trends. Most institutions cannot. If you are a coordinator or a WP5 lead in a Horizon Europe project, building this kind of measurement infrastructure from M1 — even at a much smaller scale — is one of the highest-leverage things you can do.

The second is that EU project communications and dissemination work, when done seriously, is not just compliance theatre. The Pasteur report shows what is possible when an institution treats grants as strategic infrastructure rather than as transactional funding events. The same logic applies to a single project with a serious WP5: build the network early, measure the right things, and the cumulative effect over four to five years is real.

The third, more uncomfortable point, is that the funding landscape is genuinely shifting. National funder concentration risk, NIH disruption, IDC pressure on thematic calls, and the slow rebalancing toward private and international foundations are all happening simultaneously. Strategy that worked in 2019 may not work in 2027.

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Orientos is a Vilnius-based research management SME specialising in Horizon Europe consortium support, dissemination & exploitation work, and EU grant management. We work with coordinators, partners, and SMEs across health, neuroscience, agri-food, and digital calls. The Pasteur Grants Impact Report is publicly available from the Institut Pasteur Grants Office.