National projects

One of the most common autoimmune diseases is rheumatoid arthritis (RA), a chronic condition in which the immune system attacks the body's own joints, leading to inflammation, pain, swelling, and progressive joint damage. This disease can cause joint deformities and limited mobility, significantly affecting the quality of patients’ life. Treating and alleviati...

About 10% of approved drugs form a covalent bond with their macromolecular target. Covalent drugs, previously neglected due to safety concerns, have recently taken centre stage in drug discovery programs as they pose certain advantages over non-covalent drugs, namely higher potency, longer residence time, decoupling of pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, and incr...

With 19.3 million new cases identified and 10 million cancer deaths reported in 2020, these diseases call for continued development and improvement of patient treatments, especially for malignancies that lack diagnostic and treatment options, like cholecystokinin receptor (CCK2R)-positive cancers. A promising and arising tool that has proven to be particularly effec...

Currently, our world is facing an acute shortage of vaccine adjuvants. The recent progress in our understanding of innate immunity has opened up new avenues for adjuvant development. The innate immune system is comprised of APCs, in particular dendritic cells (DCs), which contain a series of innate immune receptors. Agonists of these receptors engage DCs to more eff...

The availability and consumption of food supplements (FS) have been increasing worldwide, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak. In the EU, FS are regulated as foods, whose quality is under the responsibility of manufacturers and distributors. With the lack of proper regulation, quality issues are not only a reason for the misleading of consumers but may also pose ...

Despite significant improvements in treatment and survival rates, cancer remains one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Therefore, there is an urgent need for new drugs that act on novel targets to improve treatment outcomes, particularly against some aggressive cancers for which there are no standard therapies. The MitoTRAP (Preclinical development of mitoch...