Research database

According with the scientific and technological foresight, the Spoke 5 intents to stimulate industrial research and technology transfer on two mail research line: Innovative and digital strategies for the care of frail subjects: o Telemedicine, Health and territorial health services: the pandemic was a strong stress test for the National Health System and put public hospitals under pressure. The need of involving doctors and nurses in Covid-19 patients’ cares, along with the limitation of the access to the hospitals, had a strong impact on the possibility of carrying on the regular clinical activity. This led to delayed diagnosis and worse clinical outcomes, particularly in frail subjects and in those requiring continuous follow-up for chronic conditions. Many Institutions caught this opportunity to move towards alternative ways for carrying out clinical evaluations; particularly, the tool of telemedicine, became important and its use widely adopted. However, many potentialities of telemedicine and territorial health services are still unexploited and might be developed, by enhancing the technical tools currently available. The present project aims to push the local enterprises towards the development and scale up of hardware and software, which may assist clinicians in the delivery of telemedicine, telerehabilitation and in the empowerment of territorial assistance. Beside telemedicine, the current setting strongly requires a more comprehensive way for the delivery patients’ care. New care models are required, involving clinicians, nurses and social workers, to move the assistance from the hospitals to the home of frail subjects. Indeed, the PNRR strongly underlines that the assistance should start out of the hospitals to prevent the loss of autonomy and the risk of Institutionalization. In this framework, the present project will promote the development of technological tools useful to support these novel models of care. o Digitalization and patient monitoring: the digitalization of health system is an open issue which remained unsolved for years. Only in the last decades, some steps forward have been done, but we still have a lot of work to do. Indeed, the digitalization of the health is one of the cornerstones of the PNRR and may be applied both to the generation and integration of clinical data: in this context we will aim to promote the development of wearable devices and digital tools able to monitor different physiological and functional aspects of frail subjects in their setting. Moreover, we will promote the development of platforms able to integrate comprehensively and in the respect of the individual privacy the clinical data generated. o Health prevention including nutrition, functional food and food supplements development and testing: food is a main determinant of healthy aging; in the last years, precision medicine, aiming to define a tailored approach on a single-patient basis, is developing in many different fields of medicine. Such approach might be particularly helpful also in this specific setting and we aim to give an impulse towards a tailored nutritional approach. This would require both a better definition of individual needs and the development of food supplements which may supply individual deficiencies. Innovative and sustainable diagnostic and therapeutic strategies o Advanced diagnostics: diagnostics in medicine is continuously evolving. In the last decades, huge steps forward have been done, particularly in the fields of imaging. However we have open issues which may create criticisms in the next future. The use of contrast agents, in particular, may become a problem, since they exploit elements which are not earth abundant; moreover, their indiscriminate release post-us may be critic for environment. We are going to promote the development and the step-up to the market of novel nanoparticles and contrast agents, able to improve the diagnostic performance and fix the issues of availability and sustainability of the classical CAs.67 o Support to the development and advanced certification of medical devices: one of the most prominent requests from SMEs is the need of a support in the development of certified medical devices. In this context, the Spoke will assist local SMEs in this specific activity. o Regenerative medicine has become a novel and innovative field of medicine, which aims to repair damaged and aging tissues. In the present Spoke we are going to invest on this framework, with the specific objective of developing novel matrices and tissues helpful for tissue regeneration; moreover, we will support the technological transfer of these novel products to the market o Drug Discovery Development and Delivery: novel technological strategies may be particularly helpful in the development of new drugs; however, beside this specific aspect, we will specifically investigate the field of drug delivery. Indeed, the development of systems able to assist drug delivery may be particularly helpful to improve the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics properties of already available molecules. In this framework we will give the discovery background to assist the production of novel delivery systems by local and global enterprises.