- The President of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès, has stressed that “projects like PRECISEU are the best example of why investing in science is the best way to improve people’s lives”
The President of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès i Garcia, presented Catalonia’s leadership in the European macro-project PRECISEU (Personalised Medicine Empowerment Connecting Innovation Ecosystems Across Europe) at the Palau de la Generalitat, where he said that projects like this are “the best example of why investing in science is the best way to improve people’s lives”, since “science, above all else, is a tool at the service of people”.
The head of the Catalan executive celebrated the fact that Catalonia is spearheading a world-leading project that “will contribute to decisively accelerating the implementation of personalised medicine at a European level”and believes that the future of medicine lies in“adapting treatments to each person, to each of us according to our needs”.
Aragonès also stated that “Catalonia aspires to be able to contribute to tackling the great global challenges” and, for this reason, he highlighted the fact that PRECISEU allows Catalonia “to join forces and work together with other European peoples and nations”.
The President of the Generalitat also stressed that the PRECISEU project “is the result of commitment to science and research” and thanked the European Commission for “the commitment and confidence it has shown in the entire knowledge ecosystem of Catalonia”.
According to Aragonès, leadership of this project means that Catalonia is consolidating itself “as one of the reference hubs for health innovation on the European continent”, and he listed the whole ecosystem that the country already has around health sciences, such as the MareNostrum 5 supercomputer, the new National Centre for Advanced Therapies,research centres and groups with a high level of excellence, and the more than 1,400 companies that are dedicated to innovation in health.
The PRECISEU initiative has been chosen among the 5 winning projects of the demanding Regional Innovation Valleys(RIV) call, part of the European Innovation Ecosystems (EIE) programme, globally endowed by the European Commission with 54 million euros.
PRECISEU has a budget for the next 5 years of almost 23 million euros, half of which has been provided by the European Commission and the other half by the budgets of the participating European regions, which are 25 partners from 12 regions of 10 Member States (Spain, Germany, Belgium, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, Lithuania, Sweden, the Netherlands and Greece) and one country associated with the Horizon Europe Programme (Ukraine). In this respect, Catalonia is the region with the most participating partners.
Furthermore, in the framework of the PRECISEU project, the European Commission has designated Catalonia as a Regional Innovation Valley, a category recognised in 151 European regions.