Area Science Park has hired new staff and bought new last-generation instruments for the laboratories of the University of Salerno, which hosts the headquarters of the Trieste research centre in Southern Italy, in order to strengthen the genomics, epigenomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics sectors. The overall investment necessary to upgrade existing instruments and buy and install new equipment was worth €1.5 million, being last-generation instruments that are essential for diagnostic research and clinics.
This has been possible thanks to thefunds of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) of the Ministry of University and Research (MUR) and, in particular, to the financing to the PRP@CERIC – Pathogen Readiness Platform for CERIC-ERIC Upgrade project, of which Area Science Park is the national coordinator, which allocated 40% of the investment to Southern Italy. PRP@CERIC aims at developing a highly-specialised research infrastructure, the only one in Europe, which integrates instruments and skills in biology, biochemistry, physics, bio-electronics, virology, genomics, bio-informatics and data science to study pathogens of human, animal or vegetable origin and readily oppose the spreading of new possible outbreaks.
The Director General of Area Science Park, Dr Anna Sirica, has recently had the opportunity to visit the laboratories and meet new hires. “It is important that researchers based in Salerno work in close synergy with researchers based in Trieste at the Genomics and Epigenomics Laboratory so that they feel they are a single team sharing the same goals. This is why we promote, whenever possible, that they meet at both headquarters; mobility and exchange have always been the values that characterize the research world and this is true also for teams working at the same research centre, but at different headquarters,” said Sirica during her visit.
