In line with the results of the previous year, research groups across the Institute secured the appropriate level of funding required to strengthen their position nationally and internationally.
Once again in 2017, the funding secured at national level spiked considerably (>€10 million). The Institute’s scientific leadership was recognised again with a new four-year ”Centres of Excellence Severo Ochoa Award” by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness. In addition, four groups entered two key national technological platforms for bioinformatics (Guigó, Gabaldón, Gut) and proteomics (Sabidó), supported by the Institute of Health Carlos III‑ISCIII.
Within the framework of the new regional Strategic Plan for Health Research and Innovation (PERIS 2016-2020), two collaborative projects were launched involving CNAG-CRG groups in personalised medicine, based on genomics analysis for clinical decision-making in oncology (Gut) and undiagnosed rare neurological diseases (Beltrán).
Personalised medicine is also the focus of new collaborative grants awarded under the H2020, revolving around the integration of heterogeneous big data (IASIS/Tartaglia, EGA) and rare diseases (SOLVE-RD/Beltrán), as well as a pilot on improving data reproducibility, reusability and interoperability (European Open Science Cloud-EOSC for Research Pilot).
At European level, highlights include an ERC Starting Grant (Boke) and an ERC Proof‑of‑Concept (Valcárcel), the latter aimed at testing the therapeutic potential of new reagents for lung cancer therapy. Moreover, five post-doctoral fellows were awarded a Marie S. Curie fellowship (Fernández, Audergon, Stik, Rogalska, Schmiedel), representing a success rate of more than 50% for the Institute.
In 2017, several research groups extended their source of external support at international level and leveraged private funding, including, among others: two new research awards from the National Institutes of Health-NIH (Guigó) and from the Department of Defense-DoD (Serrano/Gill), respectively; and a research grant awarded by FUNDELA focused on identifying new paths for treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-ALS (Di Croce).