Newsletters

Dear colleagues, dear friends,

As you know Europe and the world are facing a big challenge against the SARS-CoV-2 and thousands of people from different European countries are working together to keep our patients and families safe. It is in an occasion like this that we can see the situation first-hand and understand how putting together resources, facilities and expertise can help researchers to achieve results. This is exactly what research infrastructures do: ensure that excellent scientists have access to Europe´s best research facilities, pan-European collaboration and expertise, as well as global outlook to foster the innovation.

EPTRI has been delivering excellent results during two years and a half in many different scientific areas defined as Thematic Research Platforms, mapping facilities and competence, developing feasibility studies and involving internal and external users, with the aim of covering several needs in paediatric research, as it has been done for example for Developmental Pharmacology and Placental studies.

Now that EPTRI is almost at the final rush of this first phase of design, we would like to share with all of you, who have contributed to reach this step, some of our first results. The face-to-face EPTRI Open Meeting, planned on April 2^nd-3^rd in Brussels with this objective, is going to be celebrated remotely due to the exceptional circumstances that we are all living.

In preparation of the meeting and to promote paediatric research, EPTRI has launched a call for proposals of original abstracts and reviews on several hot topics referable to the EPTRI four thematic fields of interest. The selected posters will be presented on the EPTRI website as short teaser videos, while some of the selected oral presentations will be presented during the second day of the EPTRI Open Meeting. All the videos have been selected by the EPTRI Scientific Committee and they cover the expertise and specificities of EPTRI paediatric platforms dedicated to formulations, drug discovery, biomarkers, developmental pharmacology, and medical devices. They will be available in the next weeks at www.eptri.eu.

Moreover, in occasion of the EPTRI Open Meeting, a special issue entitled “Scientific Highlights in the First European Paediatric Translational Research Infrastructure Open Meeting” has been created on Pharmaceutics, an Open Access journal with a 4.7 impact factor. EPTRI WP8 co-Leader Nunzio Denora (University of Bari, member of CVBF) is the guest editor of the special issue. All the EPTRI partners are invited to submit original research articles, reviews, opinion papers, editorials or short communications. The deadline for manuscript submissions is December 10^th  2020.
More information is available here.

EPTRI is working to develop national nodes in all the countries that have shown interest in the new Research Infrastructure and in its ambition to strengthen a collaborative environment to boost paediatric drugs developmental processes. Next crucial step for EPTRI is the application to the ESFRI Roadmap 2021, aimed to include EPTRI within the ESFRI scenario.

Stay tuned to keep updated!