ADAPTED's 6th Consortium Meeting at the historic Instituto Cajal in Madrid, Spain.
The ADAPTED Project held it's 6th Consortium Meeting last week on 22nd and 23rd of May at the historic Instituto Cajal in Madrid. Instituto Cajal is named after Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), a Spanish scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his work on the structure of the nervous system. He provided definitive evidence that the nervous system is made up of a large number of individual nerve cells separated by tiny gaps, rather than being a single continuous thread of nerve fibre – the prevailing opinion at that time.
The ‘father of modern neuroscience’, Cajal’s work is foundational to all those researching neurological disease today – including, of course, those who work on Alzheimer’s disease such as the ADAPTED consortium! ADAPTED project leader Dr Margot Bakker said, ‘Cajal had a pioneering, visionary approach to the neurological questions of his time, if he was alive today I’m sure he would have been researching the role of APOE in Alzheimer’s disease!’
This was an inspiring setting for our penultimate meeting where we laid down plans to harvest the results of our collaborative research which is now in its final year.
After a warm welcome from our hosts at the CSIC, the meeting got underway with poster presentations from many of ADAPTED's researchers. With fresh data, the consortium were able to discuss how to best coordinate our efforts to produce meaningful results and publications by the end of the project to give back to scientific research community, ensuring our work will benefit Alzheimer's research and ultimately patients, for years to come.
On the evening of the first day of the meeting, the consortium then met for a celebratory dinner at the historic Residencia de Estudiantes. Founded in 1910, the Residencia provided accommodation for students from the classic colleges at Bologna, Salamanca, Cambridge and Oxford and became established as the first cultural centre in Spain and one of the most vivid settings of creation and scientific and artistic exchange in interwar Europe. Students there include Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel and among it's famous visitors are Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and John M. Keynes.
On the second day of the meeting the ADAPTED cell research group and clinical research group reported back on their discussions from the day before, and defined work plans for the final year of the project. The meeting concluded with some closing remarks from Project Coordinator Agustín Ruiz and Project Leader Margot Bakker who thanked the group for their enthusiasm and commitment to the ADAPTED Project.
