7.8 M€ to NAP4DIVE Project for Advancing Non-Animal Drug Delivery Solutions
During summer, we got the great news that our HORIZON-RIA proposal NAP4DIVE (Non-Animal Platform for Nanoparticle-Based Delivery across the blood-brain barrier Interface with Vehicle Evolution) had been granted in total 7.8 M€ funding from the EU.
The project is an EU consortium comprising of 11 academic and company partners, coordinated by Cecilia Sahlgren (ÅAU Cell Biology). Four MADNESS PIs, Hongbo Zhang, Jessica Rosenholm, and Tapani Viitala from Pharmaceutical Sciences Laboratory, along with Sébastien Lafond from IT, constitute the other participating ÅAU research groups.
The project aims to revolutionize the traditionally expensive and inefficient drug development for central nervous system (CNS) diseases such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and brain cancer, by establishing advanced non-animal alternatives for testing and predicting nanoparticle-based drug delivery across the blood-brain barrier (BBB). The concept is thus not very unlike MADNESS, where the aim is to cross biofilms instead of the BBB.
This approach aligns with EU and global initiatives to reduce animal testing and advance human-based biomedical research models, which was also the topic of the HORIZON-RIA call “Tools and technologies for a healthy society”.
A more in-depth story can be read (in Swedish) in the ÅAU news portal: https://www.abo.fi/nyheter/forskare-utvecklar-nya-verktyg-for-lakemedel-mot-sjukdomar-i-centrala-nervsystemet/
