SUPRO-GEN Midterm Meeting, Florence 2023

Dr. Silvestre Bongiovanni Abel and Dr. Gustavo A. Abraham participated in the midterm meeting of the SUPRO-GEN project “Self-assembled polyelectrolyte systems for siRNA release in cancer, H2020 MSCA-RISE 2020 project” held in Florence, Italy from July 10th to 12th. The meeting was attended by the project coordinator, Dr. Sergio Moya from CICbioMAGUNE, San Sebastián, Spain, and representatives from all research groups in the consortium: Dr. Alejandro Sosnik (Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Nanomaterials Science, Technion Integrated Cancer Center (TICC), Faculty of Materials Science and Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology), Dr. Graciela Calabrese (FFyB, UBA, Buenos Aires), Dr. Graciela Romero (University of Texas San Antonio), Dr. Fernando Albericio and Dr. Beatriz García de la Torre (KwaZulu-Natal University), Dr. Pithi Chanvorachote (Chulalongkorn University, Thailand), Dr. Marco Marradi (Universita degli studi di Firenze, Italy), and Dr. Horacio Cabral (University of Tokyo, Japan).

About SUPRO-GEN

Gene therapy, or gene transfer, involves the therapeutic delivery of nucleic acids into a patient’s cells as a drug to treat disease. Presently, most gene delivery approaches utilise adeno-associated viruses and lentiviruses for gene insertions in vivo and ex vivo. The EU-funded SUPRO-GEN project aims to design non-viral supramolecular vectors for immunotherapy and cancer stem cell therapy with low toxicity and high transfection efficacies. Researchers will employ peptide engineering and glycoengineering of the vectors to achieve high tumour-targeting efficacy, while cell trafficking and the fate of vectors will be traced by advanced imaging techniques. The project also includes training highly skilled professionals at the interface of materials science, engineering and biological sciences.