CHRC researcher present in Düsseldorf at the annual meeting of the SIMPATHIC project, funded by Horizon Europe

The annual meeting of the SIMPATHIC consortium took place in Düsseldorf, which was attended by Sofia de Oliveira Martins, an integrated member of the CHRC and the project's principal investigator at the national level. This meeting allowed the members of the working groups of the consortium's 22 international partners to monitor progress, share emergent challenges and define goals and strategies for the coming months.

SIMPATHIC is the abbreviation that describes the innovative purpose of the project: ‘Accelerating drug repurposing for rare neurological, neurometabolic and neuromuscular disorders by exploiting SIMilarities in clinical and molecular PATHology’.

The novelty of this approach is the emphasis on the patient's perspective from the outset, a global collaborative approach linking 9 different rare neurological diseases, and totally focused on translational research that begins with the study of the natural history of the disease, in parallel with the definition of the underlying molecular mechanisms by using induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC) derived from patients, the development of clinical trials to gather clinical evidence, ending with the proposal of new regulatory solutions aimed at saving time for the approval of repurposing drugs for new indications for rare or ultra-rare diseases without approved therapeutic options, and their possible funding.

The project has a duration of five years and is entering its second year of activity.