A key to progress: “a well-integrated, collaborative and collegial consortium”

• BRAVƎ held its first External Advisory Board Meeting where the experts noted the importance to keep the translation of the BIOVAD in mind and highlighted the successes achieved during the first year of the project, despite the pandemic

February 2021. BRAVƎ project celebrated its first External Advisory Board Meeting where all work package leaders presented their work and progress within the first convulse year of the project due to COVID-19 pandemic. It was held virtually on February 5th.

The External Advisory Board (EAB) is a group of seven international experts in cardiology, regenerative medicine, computational modelling, biofabrication, tissue bioengineering, bioethics, and also a patient organizations representative. Its main role is to ensure the BRAVƎ of continued “fresh” and independent input on the project’s activities and results from the perspective of its main stakeholders.

“The objective of the meeting is for an external multidisciplinary panel of experts to give their opinion on the concept, methodology and progress of the project. An outside view can be crucial when it comes to identifying weak points,” said Dr Manuel Mazo, a researcher at Cima and Clínica Universidad de Navarra, from the project coordination team.

An expert and collaborative consortium to face an ambitious project

The EAB experts noted during the meeting the importance to keep the translation of the BIOVAD in mind and highlighted the successes achieved during the first year of the project, despite the pandemic.

In general, the experts pointed out the advantage of a project with such integrated teams: “I was impressed to see such a well-integrated, collaborative and collegial consortium. This is a strong advantage in case you need to solve issues down the road together,” said Carlijn Bouten, Professor of Cell-Matrix Interactions in Cardiovascular Regeneration at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Technische Universiteit Eindhoven.

Among the scientific achievements, “they highlighted some important points that we should pay special attention to, such as the immune response to BIOVAD in the animal model, possible technical artefacts and future translation to the patient”, stated Dr. Mazo.

In addition to Professor Bouten, the rest of the EAB are Professor Philippe Menasché (Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou, France), Dr. Elena de Juan (The University of Western Australia, Australia), Dr. Maxime Sermesant (Université Côte D’Azur, France), Dr. Ana Aranda (Servicio Murciano de Salud , Spain), Dr. Antonio Pardo (Universidad de Navarra, Spain) and Tomás Fajardo (CardioAlianza, Spain).