The “Italian network of excellence for advanced diagnosis (INNOVA)” of which Fondazione IRCCS Ca Granda Ospedale Maggiore Policlinico Milano is a public subject Coordinator and IFO-IRE IRCCS is Spoke Level 1 -  is an innovative health ecosystem composed by 43 partners between public and private universities, research institutes.

The main objective of the INNOVA project is to create a multidisciplinary advanced diagnostic platform operating within the Italian system of health care and translational research. The platform will promote the development and dissemination of standardized advanced diagnostics in the fields of wet laboratory and bioimaging technologies throughout the country, with a Hub & Spoke architecture.

The INNOVA initiative will support the life science research community operating within the national health and academic systems through tailored actions that will boost the translational research and innovation ecosystem for major human diseases (neurological, cardiovascular, degenerative, vascular, inflammatory, metabolic disorders and cancer). The program will also catalyze interactions with major industry players, including CROs, pharma, medical device and software companies, that will contribute to the long-term sustainability of the program.

Project start Date: 02/01/2023
Project end Date: 01/01/2027

The overarching goal of the project is creating a diffused diagnostic platform providing access to cutting-edge technologies and expertise available to the Italian life science R&D community, to facilitate and democratize access to infrastructures and foster excellence for the patients’ benefit. INNOVA specific objectives include:

1. generating a “catalogue” of advanced diagnostic tools and associated expertise available to academia, national health system and industry;
2. establishing offer and access sites across the INNOVA members;
3. assisting and guiding users in the choice of the right approach to obtain reliable, relevant, and reproducible results;
4. establishing collaborations/partnership with industry players.

The catalogue will progressively absorb the new advanced diagnostic approaches generated by INNOVA research activities. An additional priority of the program, as a future service, will be to interpret, merge and integrate the massive amount of data generated in an advanced multimodal analysis leading to reliable decisional and diagnostic support models.

IFO-IRE as Spoke Level 1 participates with its research activities as Leader Participant of WP4 “Liquid biopsy (LB) & Biomarkers”, and within these other WPs of the project: WP1 “microcirculation”, WP5 INNOVA platform creation and usability; WP6 Diagnostic innovation targeting extracellular matrix; WP7 “Advanced cancer diagnostics through multiomics profiling”

Contacts:

Scientific Director: Prof. Gennaro Ciliberto, gennaro.ciliberto@ifo.it

For the WP4, P.I.: Dr. Giovanni Blandino, giovanni.blandino@ifo.it

The project want realize the creation of a novel advanced diagnostic platform (INNOVA) incorporating 43 public and private entities operating within the national system of health care (NHS) and life science research across Italy. The platform will promote the development of an ecosystem that will absorb validated advanced diagnostic approaches, favoring their uptake and commercial use in clinical setting. The main objective is to make available a large number of phenotype biomarkers to organ damage and develop an integrated and advanced molecular and imaging-based platform, thus providing novel tools for prevention, early diagnosis and drug monitoring in human diseases according to the principles of personalized and precision medicine. The research program plans to first implement a diagnostic change by validating biomarkers and pathways involved in noncommunicable diseases (neurological, cardiovascular, degenerative, vascular, inflammatory, metabolic disorders and cancers), with a main focus on those with challenging diagnoses, poor therapeutic response and prognosis.