SANKT AUGUSTIN. As part of its BioPharma Initiative for Germany, the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has announced to provide up to additional EUR 15 million in the form of non-refundable grants to the Neuroallianz Consortium.

This additional funding follows the positive opinion of the BMBF on the consortium’s performance in the last three years. The BMBF was positively impressed by the successful collaboration and cooperation of the academic institutes and industrial partners and praised the achievements of the Neuroallianz Consortium. Since its installation in 2009, Neuroallianz Consortium has now received a total of EUR 40 million of funding.

The Neuroallianz Consortium focuses on the research and development of innovative diagnostics and therapeutics for improved treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. The consortium comprises of a strategic partnership between publicly funded research institutions, biotechnology companies and the pharmaceutical industry. Its objective is the translation of innovative research into novel therapies and diagnostics methods for improved staging of neurodegenerative diseases.

The Neuroallianz Consortium consists of the following academic parties: Rheinische Friedrich‐Wilhelms‐Universität Bonn, Universitätsklinikum Bonn, LVR‐Klinikum Essen/Universität Duisburg-Essen, Research Center Jülich GmbH, and Fraunhofer Institute SCAI. The industrial partners are UCB Pharma GmbH, IBL International, and Life&Brain GmbH.

Fraunhofer SCAI’s Bioinformatics Department contributes to Neuroallianz at various levels: a collaborative information technology platform has been developed that is tailored to support data exchange, intelligent data analysis, and disease-centric knowledge discovery for the partners. In a second project, integrative modeling of neurodegenerative diseases is done with the goal to identify new biomarker candidates.

“The extension of the funding will allow us to contribute now even more advanced modeling and mining solutions to the Neuroallianz consortium”, says Prof. Dr. Martin Hofmann-Apitius, Head of the Department. His expertise in the areas of information extraction and semantic text analysis is appreciated in the pharmaceutical and biotech industry worldwide.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Martin Hofmann-Apitius
Head of the Department of Bioinformatics
Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing SCAI
53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany

phone +49-2241-14-2802, fax +49-2241-14-2656
martin.hofmann-apitius@scai.fraunhofer.de
www.scai.fraunhofer.de/bio