SPI – Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação

SPI attended the kick-off meeting of the GlycanTrigger project in Porto, Portugal

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SPI attended the kick-off meeting of the GlycanTrigger project in Porto, Portugal

On the 13th and 14th of March, SPI – Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação participated in the kick-off meeting of the GlycanTrigger project – Glycans as master triggers of health to intestinal inflammation transition. The kick-off meeting took place at Fundação Engenheiro António de Almeida in Porto, Portugal.

Funded by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe Program in the scope of Research and Innovation Actions, the project is focused on studying what happens between a symptom-free phase and the diagnosis of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases. GlycanTrigger will address how changes in the composition of glycans (sugar-chains) exposed at the surface of the gut mucosa (the gut glycome), act as a primary event that dysregulates local and systemic mechanisms leading to inflammation. The project is exploring the novel concept of “glycan mimicry”, i.e., the idea that some molecules can imitate or resemble the sugar code (the glycome) found in our body and trick our immune system, ultimately causing inflammation in the digestive system.

GlycanTrigger project will last 6 years and gathers 9 partners from 7 different EU (Instituto de Investigação e Inovação em Saúde (i3S), Portugal; Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), the Netherlands; Sorbonne University, France;  Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany; GLSMED Learning Health (GLSMED LH), Portugal; European Federation of Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis Associations (EFCCA), Belgium; and Sociedade Portuguesa de Inovação (SPI), Portugal) and 2 non-EU countries (Ichan School of Medicine, USA; Ludger Limited, UK). The project started in January 2023 and is coordinated by i3S.

SPI is the partner responsible for Communication, Dissemination, and Exploitation activities and it was represented by Raquel Almeida, Diana Sousa and Beatriz Mendes, who provided an interactive presentation, where the participants were encouraged to share their vision on the future steps pf the project’s communication and dissemination strategy.