The mission of the national node EATRIS Slovenia

The vision of the national EATRIS node is to strengthen innovation in the development of drugs and services. We want to establish a chain of institutions that would enable the transfer of knowledge from an idea to a drug or a biomedical service.

The EATRIS initiative is a response to the global problem of declining numbers of new drugs, despite of the ever-increasing investment into the drug development from pharmaceutical industry and society. The main reasons for this problem are the excessive fragmentation of the research into smaller individual projects either on the level of individual institutions, on the level of individual countries or globally. Another reason is the need for expensive highly specialized equipment and the access to appropriate preclinical in vitro and in vivo models, and the complexity of establishing clinical studies.

The biomedical research is essentially application-oriented and involves the transfer or translation of the findings into clinical practice. Therefore, the large infrastructure in the field of biomedical sciences is not comparable to the large infrastructure in other scientific disciplines. The best concept of large infrastructure in biomedical sciences is thus the development of multicentric approach, which covers all phases of the research and the development, extending from the causes of a disease, detection and development of biomarkers, through the synthesis of novel molecules, to the Phase 1 clinical testing of either new active entities or diagnostic procedures. It also includes the indispensable connection of research organizations, learning bases and medical centers.

Umbrella consortium EATRIS-TRI.si

In accordance with our mission, we have established a national consortium EATRIS-TRI.si, which will strengthen the development of translation research. Three institutions that actively participate in the EATRIS ERIC platforms have already joined the consortium, namely UL FFA, National Institute of Chemistry (KI) and the Faculty of Medicine, University of Maribor (MF UM). In addition to the above, several research institutions, public institutes and agencies are participating in the wider consortium.