The international consortium RESPIRE-EXCEL has received 3.3 million euros from the EU’s Horizon Europe program: Scientists from the DZL sites CPC-M and ARCN are among those to receive funding. The aim of the project is to train young scientists to advance the personalized treatment of COPD and asthma.
Over four years, RESPIRE-EXCEL* will train 15 PhD students in the latest translational techniques through multinational projects, summer schools and interactive workshops. Partners from ten European countries as well as Australia and the USA are working together. The University Medical Centre Groningen coordinates RESPIRE-EXCEL.
In the field of asthma research at the DZL, the program is linked to the ALLIANCE register, which also aims to study disease progression and develop individualized treatment strategies using clinical data and biomaterials from about 1,200 patients and healthy controls. In the RESPIRE-EXCEL project, Prof. Önder Yildirim, Dr. Malte Lücken and Prof. Herbert Schiller (all Helmholtz Munich) from the DZL Munich site CPC-M and receive funding. They will use human organotypic models of the lung (precision cut lung slices and organoids) to study alterations in the stem cell niche of the distal airways (respiratory bronchioles) in early stages of COPD. Furthermore, the Lücken lab will collaborate with the Nawijn lab (UMCG, Groningen) to build a reference model of cellular states in the human lung in different chronic lung diseases.
The funding comes from the Marie Skłodowska-Curie program, an EU flagship scheme that aims to support the careers of excellent (post-)doctoral researchers and make Europe more attractive as a location for research.
*RESPIRE-EXCEL stands for ‘Respiratory Precision Medicine PhD Training Network- Excellence through Systems Biology, Spatial and Single-cell Transcriptomics’.