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September 6, 2015
A European consortium of corneal researchers has just been awarded 6 million Euros for a 4 year project. The EU Horizon 2020 project addresses corneal blindness, and is called Advanced Regenerative and RESTtorative Therapies to combat corneal BLINDNESS (ARREST BLINDNESS).
The objective of ARREST BLINDNESS is to develop new regenerative-based therapies for the cornea, addressing the translation of regenerative medicine, bio-artificial organs, tissue-engineered scaffolds, and advanced cell and molecular therapies into clinical use. Several preclinical studies and translational clinical studies will be performed to meet this objective, in order to help alleviate the worldwide problem of corneal blindness.
ARREST BLINDNESS is a consortium of 14 partners across 8 European countries including 5 companies, comprising some of the leading academic centers for corneal regeneration research in Europe. The consortium is led by Neil Lagali (Linköping, Sweden), and includes (amongst others) Claus Cursiefen (Cologne, Germany), Nadia Zakaria (Antwerp, Belgium), Juana Gallar (Alicante, Spain), Isabel Dapena (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), Jesper Hjortdal (Aarhus, Denmark) and Martine Jager (Leiden, The Netherlands).
ARREST BLINDNESS builds on the recently funded 4 year EU COST Action - BM1302: JOINING FORCES IN CORNEAL REGENERATION www.biocornea.eu which aims at developing an artificial Biocornea and helped to form a pan-European network of corneal regeneration researchers.
The COST Action is led by Prof. Claus Cursiefen from Cologne and Prof. Martine Jager from Leiden and includes cornea researchers from most European countries.