AIDPATH

Academia and Industry Collaboration for Digital Pathology - an international project focused on developing efficient and innovative products for digital pathology.

AIDPATH was an IAPP Marie Curie Action European Union’s FP7 Framework Programme that was going on for four years starting in November 2013. This project has received funding from the European Union’s FP7 program under grant agreement No 612471. The AIDPATH project fostered advances in Digital Pathology through a series of activities including 11 new recruitments.

HELICAL

HE alt data LI nkage for C linic AL benefit is a training network comprising 17 academic and 9 non-academic/industry partners for early stage researchers in the field of Healthcare Data Linkage for clinical usage in the GDPR era.

European researchers have made leading contributions to the large genomic, transcriptomic and clinical datasets from patients with chronic diseases. Advances in information science provide unprecedented opportunities for using these datasets to elucidate the complex biology of these disorders, its influence by environmental triggers, and to personalize their management. Exploitation of these opportunities is limited by a shortage of researchers with the required informatics skills and knowledge of requisite data protection principles. HELICAL addresses this unmet need by developing a trans-sectoral and interdisciplinary program with training in analysis of large datasets, using autoimmune vasculitis as a paradigm, as comprehensive biological and clinical datasets are already available. 

The program will be delivered through a partnership of Academic and Industry researchers with expertise in basic biomedical research, epidemiology, statistics, machine learning, health data governance and ethics.

Helical exploits recent advances in data science to link research datasets with longitudinal healthcare records, based on the robust ethical foundation required for linkage studies using near-patient data, to address key experimental questions.

Read More:  www.tcd.ie/medicine/helical/

CaSR Biomedicine

The Medical University of Vienna is coordinating an international research project, which investigates the effectiveness of tried and tested medicines for the treatment of some of the heaviest burdens of our modern society including diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. One molecule that these disorders have in common is a receptor known as the calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR).

The CaSR gene provides instructions for making a protein called the calcium-sensing receptor (CaSR). Calcium molecules attach (bind) to CaSR, which allows this protein to monitor and regulate the amount of calcium in the blood. The receptor is turned on (activated) when a certain concentration of calcium is reached, and the activated receptor sends signals to block processes that increase the amount of calcium in the blood.

The CaSR protein is found in abundance in cells of the parathyroid glands. The parathyroid glands produce and release a hormone called parathyroid hormone that works to increase the levels of calcium in the blood. When large amounts of calcium bind to CaSR in the parathyroid glands, the production of parathyroid hormone is blocked, which prevents the release of more calcium into the blood. CaSR signaling also blocks the growth and division (proliferation) of cells that make up the parathyroid glands.

The CaSR protein is also found in kidney cells. Kidneys filter fluid and waste products in the body and can reabsorb needed nutrients and release them back into the blood. Increased calcium binding to CaSR in kidney cells blocks the reabsorption of calcium from the filtered fluids.

ALKATRAS

The European Research Initiative (ERIA) was instigated to coordinate research into Anaplastic Lymphoma Kinase ( ALK )-related malignancies to facilitate the development of less-toxic and more efficacious therapies. ALK is increasingly recognized as a prevalent oncogene in a number of human malignancies and therefore poses a prominent clinical problem.

ERIA (www.erialcl.net) is an existing and functional network of 13 partners. ALK is increasingly recognized as a prevalent oncogene in a number of human malignancies and therefore poses a prominent clinical problem, which requires coordinated research into its oncogenic mechanisms. ERIA now conducts a collaborative multidisciplinary research program at the interface of biomedical and bio-mechanistic approaches, which will be an excellent environment to train the next generation of European scientists. The 15 recruited fellows will be incorporated into international academic study groups (all partners of the ERIA network) to perform high caliber research and also will be exposed to environments from other sectors to broaden their experience.Secondments will include technical training within individual laboratories and SMEs - TissueGnostics, Galkem, Cambridge Life Sciences, Sofigen and Varionostics - as well as large Pharma (Roche). Training through research will be complemented with a balanced program of transferable skills and access to local courses. The training of each fellow will be guided by a personal career development plan and supervised by a PhD committee panel. The primary goal of the network is to train the recruited fellows by participating in an internationally competitive research program and integrating them into an international network. Thereby providing competence in state-of-the-art research and development at the forefront of translational science.
This project has received funding from the European Union's FP7 program under grant agreement No 612471.
Marie Curie Initiative: Innovative Training Networks (ITN)

InCeM 2014-2018

InCeM - Research Training Network on Integrated Component Cycling in Epithelial Cell Motility. Its primary focus of research was cell migration, a fundamental biological process occurring throughout the human body at any point in life.

It is essential for vital processes such as tissue formation and wound healing and drives tissue invasion during carcinogenesis. Understanding and controlling cell migration will have major clinical impact. InCeM was an international PhD programme for highly motivated young scientists, offering early-stage researchers the opportunity to improve their research and entrepreneurial skills and enhance their career prospects. This Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network was funded by the European Community’s Framework programme HORIZON 2020. InCeM provided an international and highly interdisciplinary framework of collaborators from academia and industry with core expertise in medicine, biology, biochemistry, image analysis, modelling and engineering. InCeM included 11 beneficiaries from six European countries and Israel. They were located at four universities, four research institutes, and three companies and provide core expertise in medicine, biology, biochemistry, image analysis, modelling and engineering. In addition, more partner organisations support the network. The four-year programme was launched in January 2015 and was coordinated by Professor Rudolf Leube of Uniklinik RWTH Aachen.