Last January 8 and 9, researchers from BioISI – Instituto Nacional de Saúde Dr. Ricardo Jorge (INSA) hosted the kick-off meeting of the PerMedFH project (Personalizing diagnosis and treatment for Familial Hypercholesterolemia), funded by la Caixa Foundation with around 1 M€.

The kick-off meeting was attended by all the project partners [the University of Helsinki, Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the University of “La Réunion Medical School“, and the FH Europe Foundation] and aimed to present the different work packages and discuss the project’s schedule over the next 3 years. On this occasion, international partners also had the opportunity to visit the laboratories at INSA where the experimental part of this work, related to functional studies on genes associated with FH, will take place.

The project is led by Mafalda Bourbon and counts with the following researchers from BioISI – INSA as team members: Catarina Alves, Rafaela Lacerda, Luísa Romão and Hugo Martiniano. These institutions will create a model of care [1], providing a set of digital resources, available at an interactive website, to ensure that an individual with familial hypercholesterolemia receives the right diagnosis and the right treatment, at the right time, all over the world. The ultimate goal is that this model of care will be further on integrated in clinical practice all over the world to improve the life of individuals with this condition.

Learn more about the project here.

PerMedFH researchers during the project kick-off meeting  [photo provided by the PerMedFH project] 

[1] Adapted from https://reinventingsocialcare.co.uk/models-of-care , accessed online, 4 December 2023