Marie Curie Actions: Inspiring Researchers - Imdea

in food products, and Bioxell, an SME in Milan with expertisein vitamin D analogues. In July 2008, the Marie Curie Fellowworking at Bioxell moved to Intercept, another SME, based inthe United States and Italy.The contribution of these companies, in terms of research andtraining their respective Fellows, has been crucial to the successof the NucSys network, believes Dr Carlberg. ‘It’s all part ofcreating a truly interdisciplinary team approach to biomedicalresearch,’ he says. ‘This galvanisation of a powerful set ofconsortium members with knowledge in diverse areasmeans excellent science and excellent training for ourMarie Curie researchers.’In a very real way, NucSys is a network of young researcherswho act like the biological phenomena they are studying:in molecular networks, various signalling routes engage in‘conversations’, exchanging information and producing aunique output which depends on many factors.‘Like elements in these molecular networks’, says Dr Carlberg,‘our young researchers are positioned strategically, eachstudying a particular group of molecules.’ They then engagein conversations, he says, exchanging data and producingconclusions based on many factors.‘This parallel networking approach is without precedent inthe history of biology’, claims Dr Carlberg, ‘perhaps only rivalledby the collaborations seen among nuclear particle physicists. Inthis way, we hope to generate the beginnings of a comprehensiveunderstanding of the entire nuclear receptor network.’Project acronymNucSysFull project titleSystems biology of nuclear receptors:a nutrigenomic approach to aging-related diseasesType of grantTraining NetworkBudgetEUR 3.9 millionDuration of project01-07-2006 - 31-12-2009Scientific disciplineLife sciencesLead partnerCarsten Carlberg, PhDProfessor of Computational BiologyLife Sciences Research UnitUniversity of Luxembourg162A, Avenue de la FaïencerieLU-1511 LuxembourgBuilding BR B, Room 2.08Tel. +352 46 66 44 6267 // Fax +352 46 66 44 6435E-mail: carsten.carlberg@uni.luhttp://misb.uni.luOther partnersUniversity of Kuopio, Finland - University of Birmingham,United Kingdom - Erasmus Medical Center, Netherlands - The University of Surrey,United Kingdom - Free University of Amsterdam, Netherlands - WageningenUniversity, Netherlands - University of Oulu, Finland - Catholic University ofLeuven, Belgium - Unilever UK Central Resources Ltd, United Kingdom - Institutode Investigaciones Biomédicas, Spain - Max-Planck-Institute for MolecularGenetics, Germany - St George’s Hospital Medical School, United Kingdom -Medical University of Vienna, Austria - Bioxell, Italy - Intercept, Italy - Universityof Manchester, United Kingdom135