EATRIS acts as a European-wide 'distributed research infrastructure' to help accelerate the development of new drug treatments and diagnostic tools. The infrastructure consists of 13 member countries and more than 90 academic research centres across Europe with the headquarters located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. You can read more about EATRIS and the universities/institutes that are members of EATRIS Norway on the NCMM website.
The first EATRIS Norway meeting
On Monday 7th October, NCMM hosted the first national EATRIS Norway network meeting at the Park Inn by Radisson hotel at Oslo airport.
The meeting was attended by researchers and administrative staff from various Norwegian institutions that are members of EATRIS Norway, representatives from the Research council of Norway and Helse Sør Øst, and members of the EATRIS coordination and support (C&S) team based in Amsterdam.
NCMM coordinates the Norwegian participation in EATRIS, and NCMM Director Janna Saarela, the EATRIS National Scientific Director, opened the meeting with an introduction to the national strategy for EATRIS. This was followed by a presentation from the EATRIS Coordinator for Norway, Laetitia Abdou-Garonne, who gave an overview of the Norwegian expertise registered in the five EATRIS platforms, namely: ATMPs & biologics, Biomarkers, Imaging &Tracing, Small molecules, and Vaccines.
Dr Toni Andreu, EATRIS Scientific Director, also gave a broad overview of the European-wide activities of EATRIS and the major goals for the infrastructure moving forward. This included how to define a research infrastructure, how a translational medicine 'network-based' infrastructure compares to other scientific infrastructures such as the large hadron collider at CERN, and the challenges in establishing European collaborations through EATRIS.
Communication workshop and open seminar
On Tuesday 8th October, the EATRIS visit continued with a communications workshop in the frame of EATRIS national coordinators bi-annual meeting. This involved EATRIS C&S staff and several EATRIS national coordinators, including those from France, Italy, Sweden, Latvia, Norway and Spain.
The workshop included a guest lecture by Fran Garcia, Director of Communications at Vall d'Hebron Hospital and Research Institute in Barcelona, Spain, who discussed his experiences and successes in communicating research and medical stories to the public. This was followed by short presentations from various national coordinators discussing ongoing challenges and new approaches to promoting the EATRIS infrastructure across member institutes, as well group exercises working on practical cases.
Finally, on Wednesday 9th October, Anton Ussi, the EATRIS Operations and Finance Director, gave an open seminar titled 'An introduction to EATRIS, Europe’s Translational Research Infrastructure for Translational Medicine' at Forskningsparken.
We thank the EATRIS staff for their visit and everyone who participated in the various meetings across the week. We look forward to more EATRIS events in the future.