Bone Therapeutics awarded €3.8 million research grant

6 February 2014

Belgian company Bone Therapeutics has been awarded a share of a Marie Curie grant totalling €3.8 million to develop bio-mimetic and bio-active materials.

The four-year project, entitled “Training program on new bio-inspired bone regeneration” or Bio-Inspire, aims to develop a technology platform consisting of bio-mimetic and bio-active materials, and train the next generation of leading tissue engineering scientists.

Bio-Inspire is an integral and interdisciplinary training program on bone regeneration provided by a consortium of seven European academic and industrial partners with complementary expertise.

Bone Therapeutics’ role in Bio-Inspire will be to identify the therapeutic advantages of the combined use of scaffold and cells for orthopaedic applications as well as design subsequent clinical trials. Moreover, the Company will open a research fellowship (Postdoctoral) position and provide training to a PhD candidate, together with the University of Brussels (ULB).

Jan Bouwstra, Bio-Inspire project manager of Fujifilm commented, “We are extremely proud to have been rewarded this prestigious Marie Curie Grant. In the past 10 years, Fujifilm has developed new, unique recombinant collagen biomaterials. This Grant provides us with the opportunity to study the use of these safe, GMP-manufactured bio-materials for repair of critical size bone defects. We are proud to lead a consortium of European scientific and commercial organisations of high reputation deeply motivated to develop the orthopaedic use bio-materials to improve the quality of life for European citizens.”

Enrico Bastianelli, CEO of Bone Therapeutics commented, “We are delighted to have been selected to be part of this prestigious pan-European consortium. The award is an endorsement of Bone Therapeutics’ leading scientific and clinical expertise in the development of innovative bio-mimetic materials for bone regeneration and the training of talented scientists. We look forward to working with the other members of the consortium to deliver this project.”

Bio-Inspire is led by Fujifilm (recombinant-collagen scaffolds, NL) and also includes ISTEC (natural bio-mineralisation, IT), Erasmus Medical Center (growth factor technology, NL), Medicyte GmbH (stem cell technology, DE), Fraunhofer Institute (bone cell therapy, DE) and Universita di Bologna (Orthopaedic Therapies, IT).

The Marie Curie grant is an award aimed at stimulating researchers' career development in response to the needs of Europe's scientific community and is part of the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (FP7).

Source: Bone Therapeutics

 

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