Almirall and University of Edinburgh join BIOMAP as new partners

On 27th of May 2021, the IMI approved the inclusion of two new partners to the BIOMAP consortium.

Almirall (https://www.almirall.com/) is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on skin health. Their headquarters and main R&D centre are located in Barcelona, Spain. The company also has an additional R&D site in Germany and a R&D facility in the US. Almirall will contribute to BIOMAP by providing biosignatures operating in the different stages of atopic dermatitis patients (skin immune cell composition, skin transcriptome and systemic biomarkers) and coordinating bioanalysis of BIOMAP samples through specialised CROs. The company will furthermore provide dedicated resources to the project in the form of scientific and dermatological expertise as well as data analysis resources. Almirall specialises in Medical Dermatology and atopic dermatitis and psoriasis are two of its core skin disease areas. The company’s R&D efforts are geared towards providing new options for underserved patients who are struggling with symptoms that affect their wellbeing and quality of life. The company has about 1,800 employees and generated revenues of about 815 million euros in 2020.

The University of Edinburgh (https://www.ed.ac.uk/), also joining BIOMAP as new partner, is one of the largest and most successful universities in the UK with an international reputation as a centre of academic excellence. The University provides the infrastructure for active collaboration in clinical translational work, including state-of-the-art clinical research facilities, leading health informatics and expertise in molecular and genetic analyses. Specifically in the context of BIOMAP Prof. Sara Brown and her team will provide expertise in statistical genetic analysis and interpretation, gene-environment interaction analysis and data sharing including single molecule RNA sequencing of atopic skin and global mass spec proteomics data from skin organotypic models. Prof. Sara Brown, having transferred from University of Dundee, is honoured and delighted to be continuing her work with the BIOMAP consortium.

The BIOMAP consortium is delighted to welcome these new partners. With a budget of about 22 million € BIOMAP is the biggest collaborative public-private-partnership project focused exclusively on dermatology – namely the two most common inflammatory skin conditions, atopic dermatitis and psoriasis. Bringing together 7 pharma companies with 26 leading academic and university institutions and with the tight involvement of patient organisations, BIOMAP is assembling a biospecimen and data resource of unprecedented scale and depth to provide a taxonomic and predictive systems medicine model of these disease resulting in improved patients care. BIOMAP is expected to drive drug discovery to target causal mechanisms, shorten drug development pathways, and fundamentally change the diagnosis and management paradigm, from re-active to pro-active strategies. For further details see https://www.biomap-imi.eu/.