The Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), under the auspices of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, has recently issued a report documenting results at national level from the very first Horizon 2020 Call. Having replaced the former European Union Framework Programmes in 2014, Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU Research and Innovation Program to-date totaling at almost €80 billion of funding available over 7 years (2014 – 2020), in addition to the private investment that this EU injection is expected to attract.
According to the CDTI report, under the H2020 Call Health, demographic change and wellbeing, 45% of the successful proposals at national level were submitted by institutions from within the region of Catalonia. Out of the list of the top sixteen H2020-funded research entities across Spain, VHIO ranked in joint 3rd place with the Parc Sanitari Sang Joan de Déu, the Universidade Politécnica de Valencia (UPV), and the Fundación para la Investigación del Hospital Univesitario la Fe.
“Not only does this document reflect the research of excellence carried out throughout our region, it also confirms VHIO as a strong contender in Horizon 2020 Calls – now and in the future”, says Josep Tabernero, Director of VHIO.
More specifically, VHIO is participating in two pan-European H2020 funded projects, MoTRIcolor and MedBioinformatics. MoTRIcolor, led by VHIO, centers on the category New therapies for chronic non-communicable diseases. The Consortium will design and conduct multi-center early phase clinical trials to establish the anti-tumor activity of novel experimental therapies for patients with metastatic or advanced colorectal cancer (CRCm). For the first time, these patients will be stratified based on their gene expression profiles according to recently established signatures. Considering individual gene expression profiles, patients will then be matched to a particular clinical trial. This pioneering approach aims at identifying sensitivity of individual patients to the proposed experimental therapies towards ultimately developing more precise anti-cancer therapies for these patients. Launched at last month´s kick-off meeting hosted by VHIO, MoTRIcolor is powered by ten expert partners across Europe including two others from Spain, ICO-IDIBELL (Barcelona) and INCLIVA (Valencia).
MedBioinformatics is an inspired collaboration incorporating ten partners including four from within Catalonia – lead partner Parc Salut Mar, Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Synapse Research Management, and VHIO. Selected from the H2020 Call for proposals on Improving health information, data exploitation and providing an evidence base for health policies and regulation, MedBioinformatics will tackle the much debated topic of big data head-on. By creating medically-driven integrative bioinformatics applications focused on oncology, CNS disorders and their comorbidities, this project will explore the current dilemma concerning how best to harness, store and benefit from the huge amounts of data across patient populations and settings that remain untapped. Aimed at ultimately embedding research advances into practice as quickly as possible, it will seek to identify integrative approaches to most effectively combine and integrate diverse types of data from different sources.
Importantly, MedBioinformatics will also actively consult and engage all potential users and stakeholders in the process of creating applications that mine, integrate, analyze and display biomedical data in a way that is purposeful and immediately understandable by all end-users.
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For more information please contact:
Amanda Wren • Director of Communications, the Vall d’Hebron Instituto de Oncología (VHIO) • Tel. +34 695 207 886 awren@vhio.net
