Kick-off of the new Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network "ReWIRE"
For the next four years, 13 project members and ten associated partners from science and industry will work closely together in the "ReWIRE" project, coordinated by DWI - Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials in Aachen, Germany. Through ReWIRE, next-generation scientists will be trained to develop translational breakthrough therapeutic solutions for patients with paralysis caused by traumatic spinal cord injuries.
The new Doctoral Network "Technology-driven combinatorial therapy to rewire the spinal cord after injury" (ReWIRE) receives funding of €2.67 million from the European Union as part of the "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions" Horizon Europe initiative. Furthermore, the State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation (SERI) in Switzerland and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in the United Kingdom support this action with additional CHF 1.28 million and £530,000, respectively.
The consortium and associated partners will enable 16 Ph.D. students around Europe, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland to receive comprehensive, structured training with a well-designed curriculum and research plan, on-site courses and workshops, project meetings, and research rotations throughout Europe, the United States of America, and Canada. The goal is to bring combinatorial spinal cord injury therapies from the laboratory to the bedside on time while developing new approaches to regenerate the spinal cord after injury.
"We jointly assembled an internationally renowned team of researchers dedicated to improving the lives of people after spinal cord injury, each with their core expertise in scar tissue modulation, regenerative biomaterials, neuroprosthetics, and robotics. By joining forces, we aim to fill gaps in traditional education programs and advance research and development expertise for medical products and therapies. This doctoral network will contribute significantly to bringing Europe to the forefront of spinal cord injury therapy" says Prof. Dr.-Ing. Laura De Laporte, Member of the Scientific Board at the DWI-Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials and coordinator of ReWIRE.
In addition to the DWI – Leibniz Institute, the EU-funded project partners include the Technical University of Hamburg, Biosynth BV, ONWARD Medical NV, Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, Eindhoven University of Technology, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Studi Universitari e di Perfezionamento and Wearable Robotics srl, as well as nationally funded partners from Switzerland (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Centre hospitalier universitaire Vaudois Lausanne, University of Zurich) and the UK (Imperial College London, King’s College London).
"We are thrilled to participate in this exciting program with leading institutions for spinal cord research. We have already hired a Ph.D. candidate who is working on closed-loop control modalities for spinal cord stimulation in a jointly supervised project by RWTH (Aachen, Germany), EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland) and CHUV (Lausanne, Switzerland)”, said Joachim von Zitzewitz, Director Systems Engineering of ONWARD.
Further information about the Doctoral Network "ReWIRE" can be found here: