Congratulations to our PI, assoc. prof. Krishna Agarwal, for been funded 3.7 million EUR by the prestigious FET Open Research and Innovation Actions (RIA) program given by the Horizon 2020 European Research and Innovation Programme for her OrganVision project.
OrganVision, a technology proposal to image organoids real-time label-free, comprises 8 partners spread across 5 cities in 4 nations: Norway (Tromsø), Germany (Hamburg, Berlin), Italy (Milan), and Spain (Barcelona). The project will run for 4 years and will have a team of 24 people including the partners.
The partners are:
- Krishna Agarwal (UiT@Tromsø, coordinator, computational microscopy),
- Dilip Prasad (UiT@Tromsø, artificial intelligence),
- Åsa Birna Birgisdottir (UNN@Tromsø, cardiovascular biology)
- Florian Weinberger (UKE@Hamburg, engineered heart tissues),
- Aisada Koenig (JenLab@Berlin, microscope prototyping),
- Matteo Bregonzio (3rdPlace@Milan, big data)
- Dipanjan Bhattacharya (IFOM@Milan, biotechnology)
- Marti Duocastella (UB@Barcelona, ultrafast microscopy)
More about the project:
OrganVision envisions to shift the paradigm for organoids from disease or drug-screening models to observable tissue micro-bio-environment for unravelling key physiological and pathological processes in humans. We aspire to enable the exploitation of the most important feature of organoids – life, health, disease, and death unfolding in real-time at sub-cellular and inter-cellular scales in cells and tissues, respectively. Our ambition is to (a) overcome the central obstacle that prevents realization of the vision, namely lack of real-time high-resolution label-free imaging technology suitable for organoids, and (b) create new opportunities for organoid research and exploit them.
The team of OrganVision opines that independent efforts in the fields of microscopy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and life sciences contributes incremental improvement at best, whereas the field is in need of a leap in the technology. OrganVision cuts across individual fields of microscopy, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and medical science, brings them to a nexus of unprecedented possibilities and changes the course of organoids research forever. It is not just interdisciplinary, it also brings together diverse institutions: two academic universities, one research institute, two university hospitals and two small and medium enterprises (SMEs), for fulfilling the need of development and engagement on all the relevant fronts.