New Horizon 2020 project Pharmaceutical Open Innovation Test Bed for Enabling Nano-pharmaceutical Innovative Products – PHOENIX was launched on 1 March 2020, with participation of scientists from the Institute for Medical Research and Occupational Health (IMI) gathered in the NanoBioFaces group. The project objective is providing services to the market for the development, testing, safety assessment, GMP production and commercialization of nano-pharmaceuticals. The overall project budget is € 14.45 million with € 11.1 million co-funded by the EU.

The project consortium is composed of 11 partners from academia and industry, coordinated by the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology. The IMI team have an extremely important role in the project as members of the Core Group, while Group Leader Dr Ivana Vinković Vrček, PhD, is also the Lead of Work Package 5 “Regulatory Support”.

Dr Vinković Vrček is the Principal Investigator of two projects funded by the Croatian Science Foundation – HRZZ-IP-2016-06-2436 „NanoFaceS – Interaction of metallic nanoparticles with sulphur-containing biomolecules – implications for nano-bio interface” and HRZZ-PZS-2019-02-4323 „SENDER – Safe-by-Design Approach for Development of Nano-Enabled-Delivery Systems to Target the Brain”. We believe that the results and collaborations that arose from these projects provided added value to the current project application.

Summary of the PHOENIX project is available here.