Marie Curie Initial Training Network for dr. Annemarie Meijer
November 2011 - Dr. Annemarie H. Meijer at the Cell Observatory will be coordinator of a new Marie Curie Initial Training Network. She will receive 3.7 million euro funding from the European Seventh Framework People Programme. The four year project, starting January 2012, is called “FishForPharma: Training Network on Zebrafish Infection Models for Pharmaceutical Screens”.
Image: Green fluorescent macrophages in a zebrafish embryo phagocytosing red fluorescent Salmonella typhimurium bacteria (image by Erica Benard)
Infectious diseases caused by pathogenic micro-organisms are major causes of death, disability, and social and economic disruption for millions of people. During evolution these pathogens have developed intricate strategies to manipulate host defence mechanisms and outwit the immune system. To reduce the burden of infectious diseases it is important to increase understanding of these host-pathogen interaction mechanisms and to develop more effective strategies for drug discovery. The zebrafish holds much promise as a high throughput drug screening model. In the last few years, zebrafish models for studying human pathogens or closely related animal pathogens have emerged at a rapid pace. The fact that zebrafish produce large amounts of embryos, which develop externally and are optically transparent, gives unprecedented possibilities for live imaging of disease processes and is the basis of novel high-throughput drug screening approaches. FishForPharma aims to deliver the proof-of-principle for drug discovery using zebrafish infectious disease models and to increase understanding of host-pathogen interaction mechanisms to identify new drug targets for infectious disease treatment.
The FishForPharma training network brings together leading European research groups that have pioneered the use of zebrafish infection models and partners from the Biotech and Pharma sectors that aim to commercialize zebrafish tools for biomedical applications. The network will employ 11 PhD students and 3 early-stage postdoctoral researchers in 5 European countries (for more information download the advertisement ). Their education programme will include training-through-research in individual projects, secondments at network partner’s research groups, and a variety of local and network-wide courses and workshops.
Institute of Biology, Leiden University , The Netherlands – Dr. Annemarie H. Meijer (Coordinator)
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) , France – Dr. Georges Lutfalla
Wageningen University , The Netherlands – Dr. Geert F. Wiegertjes
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) , France – Dr. Pierre Boudinot
Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC) , Spain – Dr. Antonio Figueras
The University of Sheffield , United Kingdom – Dr. Stephen Renshaw
University of Cologne , Germany – Dr. Maria Leptin
Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM) , France – Dr. Annette Vergunst
ZF-screens BV , The Netherlands – Dr. Ron Dirks
ZF-Biolabs , Spain – Dr. Joaquin Guinea
GlaxoSmithKline Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus , Spain – Dr. Luis Ballell (Associated partner)
Last Modified: 09-01-2012
