Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR) through the Centre for Cellular & Molecular Biology (CCMB) will be collaborating with Institut Pasteur (France) in specific health research fields, including genomics of inherited diseases, which will lead to precision and personalised medicines.
A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between CSIR Ddirector general Dr. Shekhar Mande and Institut Pasteur president Prof. Stewart Cole on Tuesday to take the initiative forward. The question of infectious diseases and their ability to re-emerge, better understanding of antimicrobial resistance and research in the development of new models for drug screening are the other areas of collaborative research being planned.
The pact is a follow up of Prof. Cole’s visit to CSIR-CCMB in January 2020 here when scientists of both research institutes had decided to collaborate on the subjects mentioned above. This is also a jointeffort to tackle potential new global health threats that could surface in future, said an official release.
The new collaboration perfectly fits with France Healthcare Innovation 2030 program whose overallambition is to make it a leading European nation in terms of healthcare innovation andsovereignty, particularly in terms of biomedical research, clinical trials and, more generally, disruptive innovations in the health sector.
This is through the development of biotherapy and support for specialisthealthcare start-ups in order to achieve “a medicine that is more predictive, more preventive and moreinnovative. Such an ambitious plan would not be realistically achieved without intense and fruitfulinternational research collaborations”, said the release.
The hybrid event was witnessed by Ambassador Emmanuel Lenain and Director General for Research and Innovation at the Ministry ofHigher Education, Research and Innovation Claire Giry and others.
Institut Pasteur is a non-profit private foundation dedicated to the study of biology, micro-organisms, diseases, and vaccines. For over a century, it has been responsible for discoveries to control diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, tuberculosis, poliomyelitis, influenza, etc. It is located in 25 countries.CSIR – CCMB has also demonstrated very important achievements, for instance a collaborationleading to a low cost vaccine against Hepatitis B, said the release.
