Starting from February 12 R4R is now involved in sponsoring of the BOBO Racing Team. This team support and promote the rally activity for driver with handicap. The team is open to rally, allycross, VST, kart drivers and this year will partecipate to the Italian Championship of Autocross (VST).
R4R will be on Race with G. Sciortino with a Renaul Clio 1.8 16V. Today the Car is under costruction and we will update time by time on the status of the car:
Now is installed the new Roll Bar
Tele-Rehabilitation Assistant for Low Back Pain
TeRAsBack aims to develop a Tele-Rehabilitation Assistant for low back pain, covering aspects of treatment and evaluation after a preliminary diagnosis is announced and treatment has been performed. The system will be based on natural interfaces, with the possibility of on-line patient monitoring by the own system, including adequate corrections in order to ensure the best and the faster rehabilitation, and with off-line supervision of specialist.
R4R -Medical Device
A group of collaborators with specific background in the different fields of the MD market. The Group developed a very strong network to support medical device companies in approaching the Italian market, the activities directly followed are Sales Area management, Reimbursement Management, Repertory e HTA Regional Submission, Pre-Market activities evaluation.
We are focused in Neuro-stimulation, Spine Surgery and we have agents and distributors that can cover the entire Italian Area. They are on the network and inside Hospitals every day in direct contact with our potential end-users. We have strong relation with Italian and European CRO that manage our studies. We have an external collaborator that isstrategically placed to follow the pre-market activities. For this reason I think that R4R despite being a small company has the perfect network to open the future market of TeRAsBack product.
From our point of view this opportunity is really important to complete our approach that cover Spinal Cord Stimulation, Surgical Spine Procedure end finally Rehabilitation.
All these activities with a strong focus on NEW approach with the most innovative devices for examples: innovative high frequency SCS, innovative cages implant kit (new systemic approach in spine surgery with a software simulation) and hopefully the new TeRAsBack.
Medical Device Division is constituted by professionals with large and recorded experience in the field of Medical Devices’ market in Italy. Main skills cover different areas such as
Sales Area Management, Reimbursement Management, Repertory e HTA Regional
Submission, Agents and Distributor network Management, Pre-Market activities
evaluation. Moreover we follow entirely the process that allow a medical device
to be implanted, from registration on DataBase of the Ministry of Health,
Clinical Operation Management (Ethical Committee – Ministry of Health) ,
Development and Study of DRG, Forecast and Budget, Supporting in Operating
Room, Training and supporting Clinical Activities.
We are are focused on new technologies on the back pain therapies. We are developing different collaboration with foreign companies providing management and technical support for the Italian activity.
Today we are working in collaboration with :
Neuromedical : www.neuromedical.it
Spontech : www.spontech-spine.com
Nevro : www.nevro.com
In 2012 R4R will start a service called “NMR Metabolic Profiling Service”
Our metabolic profiling experts will help you with the study design. We will guide you through the process of defining sample types, numbers and protocols to be used. If you already have samples collected, we will study the feasibility of the profiling and decide the best extraction method for the analysis proposed.
WHICH ARE THE POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS?
The study of the metabolic profiles of disease. Metabolite concentrations can be studied in human biofluids, such as plasma, serum, urine, prostatic fluid, bone marrow aspirates, cerebrospinal fluid, etc. as well as cellular and tissue extracts. Biofluids and tissues coming from animal models are often used too.
In preclinical drug studies, metabolomics can provide information of the toxic effects of a drug, identifying the site and the timing of action. If we know the metabolic profile associated with a disease, we can use metabolic profiling to follow pharmacological treatment and its metabolic responses, with special attention to treatment fine tuning and caring of side-effects. An interesting new branch of such studies is called pharmaco-metabolomics, which is aimed at using metabolic profiles to determine a priori the response of an individual to xenobiotics with the final goal of improving drug use and getting closer to customized treatment.
It is used in strain identification or metabolic fingerprinting. It can be used for optimization of biotechnological processes by identifying either efficient strains or the best growth conditions in reactors. Microbial ecology, bioremediation and environmental studies can also be benefited by metabolic profiling studies.
Metabolic profiling provides the high throughput approach required in data based top down approaches, classical in the systems biology field of study. Studies of metabolic modeling require accurate measurements of absolute concentrations of metabolites in a given system.
Are you already interested in it? Contact with us!
Forthcoming release of the Book containing the Chapter on "Data analysis and interpretation in Metabolomics"
The forthcoming release of the book “Systemic Approaches in Bioinformatics and Computational Systems Biology: Recent Advances” contains a chapter on data analysis and interpretation in metabolomics. You can read a sample or purchase it following this link. Here you have the abstract:
Metabolomics represents the new ‘omics’ approach of the functional genomics era. It consists in the identification and quantification of all small molecules, namely metabolites, in a given biological system. While metabolomics refers to the analysis of any possible biological system, metabonomics is specifically applied to disease and physiopathological situations. The data collected within these approaches is highly integrative of the other higher levels and is hence amenable to be explored with a top-down systems biology point of view. The aim of this chapter is to give a global view of the state of the art in metabolomics describing the two analytical techniques usually used to give rise to this kind of data, nuclear magnetic resonance, NMR, and mass spectrometry. In addition, the author will focus on the different data analysis tools that can be applied to such studies to extract information with special interest at the attempts to integrate metabolomics with other ‘omics’ approaches and its relevance in systems biology modeling.
It happens recently that a student ask me some advices about the choice of the PhD studenship.
Even if on Nature has recently appeared the article “Fix the PhD. No longer a guaranteed ticket to an academic career, the PhD system needs a serious rethink” [Nature 472, 259–260 (21 April 2011)] it probably will take many months or even years until some real and remarkably changes will be taken. Hence my suggestions were to think to go further and to start a PhD Program… but the question is of course the same: where to apply?
I ended up with a list of useful links where to look in:
http://ec.europa.eu/euraxess/
http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/projects_en.html
http://www.nature.com/naturejobs/science/welcome
http://www.phds.org/
But in my opinion (because being an R4R J) I would strongly suggest a PhD studenships in collaboration with a company, possibly a SME (Small and Medium Enterprises).
And probably the most interesting possibility is the recent Marie Curie’s call ITN (Initial Training Network) whose deadline is the 12 January 2012. Very briefly ITN project proposals may take one of three forms: Multi-Partner ITNs (Multi-ITN), European Industrial Doctorates (EID), Innovative Doctoral Programmes (IDP).
Are you working in the field of structure determination of biomolecules or the elucidation of their macromolecular complexes? Probably you’d be interested in the Transnational Access (TA) activities of the Bio-NMR project financed by the European Commission’s Framework Programme 7 (FP7) that involves a comprehensive group of top NMR research infrastructures (RI) providing access in Europe and related stakeholders. As explained in Bio-NMR web page, the objectives of TA are:
Map of the Large Scale Facilities
When our group started to work on metabolomics field, it has very soon emerged the necessity to quantify metabolites in a given mixture. At those times Bruker technical support strongly discourages us to apply an ERETIC protocol on a cryogenic probe because the ERETIC signal uses the same pre-amplifier of the probe, resulting in a decrease of sensitivity. Since then we have decided to apply an alternative way to perform absolute quantification using the PULCON algorithm (Wider et. al 2006). We also decided to apply spectra deconvolution using the GSD algorithm to quantify also those signals deriving from overlapping regions. Quantification and GSD have been presented at different congresses.
Mestrelab’s NMR Software Seminar
• Two posters will be presented: n° 42 and 59
• Attending to the Workshop “University vs. Industry: Challenges for Doing Innovative Science”
