At the IGTP TODAY
The seed-funding round for the IGTP Spin-off Time is Brain has reached its financing objective in record time almost as soon as it opened. The company opened the round on the platform Capital Cell and has not only reached the goal of 640,000, but has passed it and received 800,000, the figure the spin-off had set as a maximum.
Mireia Ramos Rodríguez is a bioinformatics post-doctoral researcher; she focusses on defining the changes in cis-regulatory elements that can lead to the development of disease and programming to provide tools for other researchers to carry out their analyses. She has been awarded the Prize for Best Research Paper in Health by a Predoctoral Researcher for her article published in Nature Genetics.
The study focusses on understanding the mechanisms that keep the infection latent without the infected person developing the disease. 90% of people infected never develop the active disease, understanding this mechanism so that we can identify them is key to eradicating tuberculosis. The research has been carried out in virtual lungs, developed by computational modelling techniques. These are the first results to be published by the 3Rs Programme at the Centre for Comparative Medicine and Bioimage (CMCiB) which aims to minimize the use of animals in pre-clinical research.
The Neuromuscular and Neuropediatric Group at the IGTP, led by Gisela Nogales-Gadea have identified a subset of patients with an atypical type of myotonic dystrophy type 1 (MD1), which develops later and with more severe symptoms than usual. This has important implications for diagnosis of these patients, who can be misdiagnosed or not given the correct prognosis. It is also vital for managing the disease correctly in patients and their families. The study has been published in Human Mutation.
