Faculty of Medicine of MUNI celebrates great success – It will be at the lead of drug development for cell and gene therapy

The great news of the end of the year is the winning of the international project of the European Centre of Excellence CREATIC, which succeeded in the Teaming for Excellence project call of the Horizon Europe programme in a huge international competition of 116 ambitious projects.

The guarantor of the project is Associate Professor Regina Demlová, Head of the Institute of Pharmacology at Medical Faculty of Masaryk University and also the principal investigator of CZECRIN. She considers the possibility of exploiting the potential of gene and cell therapies for the permanent treatment of patients with rare diseases to one of the greatest challenges of modern medicine.

The European grant will enable the creation of an international centre of excellence, CREATIC (Central European Advanced Therapy and Immunotherapy Centre), which will link geographically close academic and clinical departments to increase the availability of highly personalised treatments for patients for whom there is currently no adequate standard treatment. “Thanks to this project, we will be able to start systematically developing gene therapies in Brno that can bring new treatment options for patients suffering from certain rare diseases,” says Associate Professor Demlová.

Experts from the Advanced Cell Immunotherapy Unit (ACIU) at the Institute of Pharmacology and CZECRIN are already enjoying success with cell therapy development, for example in the treatment of the rare congenital disease “butterfly children” – epidermolysis bullosa (EB).