Massimiliano Borsani appointed as EurOPDX Research Infrastructure Manager

After internal consultation, Prof. Enzo Medico, the Coordinator of the EurOPDX Distributed Infrastructure for Research of patient-derived Xenografts (EDIReX), appointed Dr. Massimiliano Borsani as Research Infrastructure Manager of the project. Massimiliano is the first to hold this new position and is hosted by the European Institute of Oncology (IEO) of Milano, Italy. A Ph.D. in Bioinformatics, he recently earned an MBA in Management of Research Infrastructures, a program developed by RItrain, the EU Research Infrastructure Training Programme.

Before being hired, Massimiliano was working at the University of Milano-Bicocca (UNIMIB) in maximizing the participation of the University at top-level, global and European ESFRI Research Infrastructures (RIs - www.esfri.eu), and in increasing awareness about the opportunities the RIs offer to scientists and researchers, in all knowledge domains. He is the former Project Manager of the Italian node of ISBE, the ESFRI project to create a Research Infrastructure for systems biology (www.sysbio.it), and the Interim Liaison Officer of ISBE Europe, positions he leaved moving to EDIReX.

“Research Infrastructures (RIs) must provide solid, quality-based services to scientists, to increase the reproducibility of their findings and the credibility of science in general. They should be as open as possible and provide access to private companies too, SMEs in particular” – he stated - “In the EurOPDX RI, we have the right knowledge and, overall, the right people to impact on patients by supporting the preclinical development of personalized therapies in oncology through our portfolio of top-quality services. One of my objectives as Manager is now to ensure the sustainability and growth of our RI capabilities.”

EDIReX is a Horizon 2020 INFRA project (INFRAIA-02-2017 calls; grant N. 731105) to establish a cutting-edge European infrastructure offering Trans-national Access (TA) to PDX resources to academic and industrial cancer researchers, including the distribution of cryopreserved samples to third parties, the structured biobanking of user-developed models, and the performance of efficacy studies. It includes IT activities for creating a public EurOPDX Data Portal for efficient and user-friendly query and visualisation of clinical, molecular and pharmacological annotation of the models.