Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University will be at the forefront of drug development for cell and gene therapies

Two years of effort bore fruit in the Advent time. The Faculty of Medicine of Masaryk University succeeded in a huge international competition of 116 ambitious projects and received support from the Teaming for Excellence call under the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. Over the next six years, it will build a unique facility for research, development and innovation of cell and gene therapies, especially for the treatment of rare diseases.

For the Faculty of Medicine MU, this is a historic first of its kind, the first project that it has initiated, prepared and will coordinate. "This is an extraordinary European success, which brings our faculty to a new level of quality," says Dean Martin Repko.

The European grant will enable the establishment of an international centre of excellence, CREATIC - Central European Advanced Therapy and Immunotherapy Centre, which will link geographically close academic and clinical centres to increase the availability of highly personalised treatment for patients for whom there is currently no adequate standard treatment. The medical school will develop its existing expertise in the research and development of drugs for advanced therapies with teams from the Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology, the University of Leipzig in Germany and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.

The guarantor of the project is Associate Professor Regina Demlová, Head of the Department of Pharmacology FM MU, who considers the possibility of using the potential of gene and cell therapies for the permanent treatment of patients with rare diseases as one of the greatest challenges of modern medicine. Success in international competition will enable the establishment of facilities for research and development in this field in accordance with the highest global standards.

"Thanks to this project, we will be able to start systematically developing gene therapies in Brno, which may bring new treatment options for patients suffering from certain rare diseases," says Associate Professor Demlová, pointing out the considerable social impact of the project. "Rare diseases and modern therapies are not the priority areas of drug development for big pharmaceutical companies, but at the same time, there is a high medical need for new treatments in this area. Within the CREATIC centre, we will also address the socio-economic aspects of these therapies, including cost-benefit analyses under the concept of Fair Medicine."