4th General Assembly of Horizon 2020 ‘TO_AITION’
Today our team will meet up with our collaborators throughout the Netherlands and Europe during one and a half days to discuss the progress, results and next steps for our Horizon 2020 TO_AITION project. As partners affiliated with the UMC Utrecht it is a pleasure to be this year’s host in our hometown at the Quinton House.
In our project researchers and administrators from 13 different public and private partners collaborate to answer the question: what the link is between cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and major depression (MD)?
Major depression is a common comorbidity of CVD affecting one in three patients, among which women earlier and more frequently, which poses a significant health and economic burden to society. The mechanisms underlying this comorbdity remains elusive. Through the European Horizon 2020 program our consortium TO_AITION received funding in support of the aim to better understand the CVD-MD co- and multi-morbidities, discover causative mechanisms, druggable-targets and biomarkers. At the same time TO_AITION aims to develop novel methods and research directions to improve the prevention, diagnosis, and the treatment of these paired morbidities. Ultimately we hope to bridge the knowledge gap that drives CVD-depression comorbidity by integrating basic, preclinical and clinical research in order to identify the underlying immune-metabolic mechanisms that lead to these diseases.
4th General Assembly at the Quinton House.
The project started end of 2019, early 2020, with a kickoff meeting in Greece. Covid forced us to move to Slack and regular Zoom- and Teams-meetings. So after almost 3 years confined to the digital world, it is nice to finally meet people in 3D. These types of meetings are small and deliberately modest in setup to facilitate the open discussions on the presented results, successes, issues and failures. The atmosphere is such that researchers at any career-level (from student to professor) feel comfortable to ask questions and approach each other for ‘offline’, i.e. outside of the meeting, for further discussions during diner and drinks. While regular video-conferencing is effective, it remains a far cry from a session in real-life which enables human interaction that forges professional bonds unattainable through digital meetings; such bonds also go along way throughout digital meetings and future collaborations. More importantly, these meetings are hugely inspirational and fueling creativity leading to new and better ideas on what to do next. At the same time they are goal-oriented and geared towards a collaborative effort to reach the deliverables and milestones towards finishing the tasks in each workpackage.
Of course being raised and living for most of my live in Utrecht, I am proud to present our beautiful city with it’s characteristic Dom Tower, the Canals, and the historical buildings. I hope this little group of fellow Europeans go home with ‘t Stichtse in their hearts.
