“la Caixa” Foundation supports basic, clinical and translational research projects in biomedicine with 25.7 million

”la Caixa” Foundation has selected 29 new projects of biomedical research of excellence with great social impact within the CaixaResearch call for Health Research 2024, endowed with 25.7 million eurosso that they can be carried out in different research centers, hospitals and universities of Spain and Portugal.

The call, to which they had submitted in this seventh edition 580 basic research proposalsclinical and translational, is especially aimed at addressing health challenges within different areas: infectious diseases (with 7 selected projects), oncology (6), cardiovascular and metabolic diseases (5), and neurosciences (5). In addition, another 6 chosen initiatives will develop enabling technologies in one of these fields.

Among the selected This year there are, for example, projects aimed at exploring new strategies to deal with the bacteria that cause tuberculosis or to combat heart disease; to improve understanding of the liver disease associated with obesity; to develop a synthetic retina to recover vision in cases of blindness due to retinitis pigmentosa; to understand how the parasite that causes sleeping sickness manages to invade the tissues; to generate human organs in host animals from stem cells; or to develop a replica of the ecosystem of a colon tumor on a chip to study the effectiveness of immunotherapies.

Financial support of up to one million euros

The aid represents a financial support from up to 500,000 euros for projects submitted by a single research organization and up to one million euros for projects submitted by consortia made up of between two and five research organizations. All of them will have up to three years to carry out their investigations. This year the 29 selected projects They are led by scientists from 11 Spanish and 6 Portuguese centers. The consortium projects have the collaboration of research groups from the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Italy, Israel and Australia.

CaixaForum Madrid has welcomed this Tuesday the act of delivery of aidwhich was attended by representatives of the ”la Caixa” Foundation such as the deputy general director, Juan Ramón Fuertes; the president of the Scientific Committee, Javier Solana; the director of the Area of ​​Relations with Research and Health Institutions, Ignasi López; the trustee of the Foundation and honorary president of the Banco Português de Investimento (BPI), Artur Santos Silva, and the member of the BPI Social Responsibility Committee, José Pena do Amaral. Also attending were the president of the Luzón Foundation, María José Arregui, and the president of the Board of Directors of the Fundação para a Ciência ea Tecnologia (FCT), Madalena Alves, in addition to the researchers who are in charge of the projects.

In the words of deputy general director of the ”la Caixa” Foundation, Juan Ramón Fuertes, “This ceremony is intended to be something more than the recognition to the winning projects. We want this to be an occasion for researchers to connect with each other and to encourage scientific synergies and collaborations with a goal that unites us all: build the future of health together.

A competitive and collaborative call

The call is made in collaboration with the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)a public body linked to the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation of Portugalwhich contributes 2.9 million euros to subsidize three of the nine Portuguese projects selected in this edition. Likewise, it is also supported by the Luzón Foundation, which subsidizes, together with the ”la Caixa” Foundation, a project on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

CaixaResearch for Health Research It is a competitive call that has international experts of great prestige in their fields of study for the selection of projects of greatest scientific excellence and social impact. Since the beginning of the program in 2018, the total funding for the call has been 145.7 million euros for 200 projects137 of them, led by Spanish teams, and 63 by research groups from Portugal. Currently, this is the most important philanthropic call for research in biomedicine and health in Spain and Portugal.

Researchers who wish to apply for aid in the 2025 call They can present their projects until November 20 of this year. As a novelty, in the next edition the initiatives focused on rare pediatric diseases and type 1 diabetes will have the opportunity to receive specific funding within the framework of collaborations with the Sant Joan de Déu Research Foundation and the Breakthrough T1D Foundation respectively.