The first technological computational medicine center in Italy is born in Genoa, a bio-medical research center, with the aim of identifying increasingly personalized and effective therapies, as well as boosting robotic medicine, in partnership with industrial players in the sector. Thanks to the Pnrr, a total of 405 million euros will be invested in the project.
The ministries of Health, Research and Regional Affairs, together with the Liguria Region, signed the memorandum of understanding that gave the green light to the project today. A project that candidates our country to a leading role in the double scientific revolution already underway for years, that of genomics and the management of big data, the keys to providing patients with the most appropriate treatments.
In fact, the doctor observes the symptoms, acquires the data, traces the diagnosis and establishes a clinical therapy. The vaulted mathematical models can help in the pre-clinical phase thanks to their predictive and non-invasive ability, allowing to create a model of the patient that describes the physiological and pathological processes. And not only this, they will also make it possible to create scenarios for the evolution of certain pathologies that are difficult to obtain with the tools of traditional medicine. This is what the branch of computational medicine is based on, which will now receive a decisive impulse from the new Center which should have the Genoese hub of Erzelli as its hub of reference, home to the scientific, technological and clinical infrastructures, then connected to the other centers. of reference.
The Project, informs the Ministry of Health, aims to develop, through computational computation, algorithms for the expression of biological models of pathologies in the areas of inflammasome, genomics of rare diseases and neuroscience as well as applications of programs emulating neural systems in technologies robotics for use in the biomedical field, also promoting the creation of innovation processes in combination with the industrial subjects of the sector in specific “areas – workshops” for experimentation and testing of the technologies developed in translational research processes.
On the one hand, the Project integrates with the construction of the “New hospital of the west / Policlinico San Martino di ponente” and on the other hand creates and enhances important synergies with the public IRCCS of the Liguria Region (Irccs Policlinico San Martino and Gaslini Hospital), the technological and computational research structures of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and the Technological Pole of the University of Genoa.
The Center, while covering all areas of life sciences, will be able to have a particular focus on neuroscience issues, from birth to adulthood with the aim of identifying the main pathological drivers of different conditions and allowing, for example: the assessment of markers to identify patients from the preclinical or early stage of the disease (from Autism to Alzheimer’s), allowing to set individualized and preventive strategies to improve the patient’s prognosis and quality of life; the identification of new cellular and molecular targets for the development of innovative pharmacological tools; the creation of digital twins inspired by biology, driven by multimodal data and based on intrinsically multiscale computational techniques.