Projects - Toscana Life Sciences

The development of projects, from basic research to industrial application, is one of the missions of Toscana Life Sciences Foundation (TLS). Projects represent one of the most important instruments which make TLS a natural gathering of expertise, able to develop synergies and relations: a network where to start to overcome limits and localistic interests fostering, on the contrary, a global vision of competition and ideas contamination.

Project OMVac – Outer Membrane Vesicles (OMVs) is one of the flagship of the Foundation activity. It is a project developed in the field of European Commission Seventh Framework Programme which brought a 2,61 millions euros funding for 5 years. OMVac provides the application of synthetic biology to obtain new bacterial strains for the production of multivalent vaccines against infective diseases and tumors. The role of TLS is to cooperate to the platform development and to the development strategy validation also using innovative in-vivo models.

In addition to OMVac another project which obtained an European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant is the one leaded by the scientist Rino Rappuoli, a pioneer in the vaccines field, aimed at finalizing a new strategy able to contrast the always more increasing emergency of antibiotics bacterial resistance.

Among the concluded projects there is NERRI, Neuro-Enhancement: Responsible Research and Innovation, started in 2013, which involved TLS and a consortium of 11 european Countries in the field of Cognitive Enhancement in the European Research Area for the creation of a normative framework supporting policies which rule the techenologies’ development in this field.
Furthermore, thanks to this project started in 2013 with Telethon fundings, TLS contributed to carry on reasearches in the field of genetic diseases, in particular MMACHC, a rare congenital defect of vitamine B12 metabolism.