Mayo Clinic to receive EU funding
To support cardiovascular and neurological studies in the first instance
Mayo Clinic, a US organisation focused on medical care, research and education, is to receive US$10m in research funding from the European Union (EU) as part of a $220m grant to its collaborator, the St Anne’s University Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic.
The overall award will be used to support clinical research and education at the International Clinical Research Center (ICRC) at St Anne’s and will focus initially on cardiovascular and neurological studies. Mayo will support the collaboration in the US.
Part of the funding will pay for the ICRC’s expanding facilities, now under construction in Brno and scheduled to become operational in autumn 2012. It also will support research collaborations with other medical centres across Europe.
‘The ICRC will function much like the international space station,’ said Tomas Kara, head of the ICRC. ‘Fellow researchers will come from other countries to work together in the new centre to solve problems confronting patients and physicians around the world. This approach will shorten the research process by half.’
The ICRC-Mayo collaboration has relationships with researchers in Belgium, Spain, Poland, UK, Italy, and at the University of Minnesota in the US.
‘This is great news for both the Czech Republic and for Minnesota,’ said Eric Wieben, Minnesota Partnership director and Mayo’s associate dean for research collaborations. ‘There are no borders to medical research. We look forward to a long and productive relationship.’
The EU is supplying 60% of the $220m, with the Czech government, Southern Moravian County and St Anne’s University Hospital the remaining 40%.