Warsaw Plant Health Cluster (WPHC), based at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences (Poland), consists of over 60 researchers and over 40 PhD students, grouped into several research teams dealing with various aspects of the Plant Health domain. The primary objective of the Project is to enhance research capacity of the WPHC, to enable it to respond to the new challenges posed by evolving EU plant health regulations and to ever increasing social demand for healthy fresh produce of high quality.The enhancement will be achieved through execution of an array of inter-related activities, conducted in Partnership with over 20 European research organisations. In effect, internal WPHC organisation and institutional research policy will be modernised and updated. Pre-identified competence gaps will be filled and international networking and visibility of the WPHC will be improved through extensive staff exchange and secondment (almost 200 exchange visits), organising international mini-symposia (6) and workshops (12), and presentation of current WPHC results on over 70 international conferences. Its research capacity will be improved further through hiring 7 experienced researchers and organising two new laboratories plus upgrade of five others. To ensure sustainable WPHC operations beyond the Project lifetime, several (3-7) collaborative project proposals will be prepared, and submitted with partners to appropriate donors (national, bilateral and international, including EC FP-7 mechanism).The changes in EU and national plant health regulations are expected to create increased long-term demand for bio-intensive IPM tools and thus will add social relevance to the WPHC operations. The Project will remove the major bottlenecks in further development of the WPHC research teams, and will improve their capacity to better respond to this demand. In particular, the project will ensure better integration of the WPHC within the European Research Area through upgrading its research, human and material capacity, which will provide much needed innovation boost and will directly impact on its capacity for increased contribution to regional economic and social development.