Friedhelm Hummel receives ETH Board grant for stroke research
Friedhelm Hummel (credit: EPFL)
The ETH Board has awarded a team of researchers from the Center of Neuroprosthetics (CNP) at EPFL led by Friedhelm C. Hummel 3 million Swiss francs towards research into personalized precision medicine for stroke recovery within the Personalized Health and Related Technologies (PHRT) program.
The PHRT is one of the strategy focus areas of the ETH Board. Its mission is to enable the use of the large amount of health- and illness-related data currently available in order to develop and improve personalized treatment for patients. In that framework, the PHRT works closely with the Swiss Personalized Health Network initiative and the ETH Board’s strategic focus on Data Science.
Following their first call for proposals, a team of four Professors in EPFL's Center for Neuroprosthetics – Friedhelm Hummel, Olaf Blanke, Silvestro Micera, and Dimitri van de Ville – submitted a project entitled: "Towards personalized precision medicine for stroke recovery: a multi-modal, multidomain longitudinal approach”, which has now been approved and awarded with 3 million Swiss francs for a period of 36 months.
The project has a special model character, as it will be carried out at EPFL's satellite campus in Sion (EPFL Valais Wallis) in close collaboration with three local clinics: the Hôpital Valais de Sion, the Clinique Romande de Réadaptation (CRR) and the Berner Klinik Crans-Montana. This will allow the precision medicine-focused project to better leverage scientific and clinical expertise and excellence.
"This project will allow us to better understand the course and mechanisms of recovery from stroke – the main cause of long-term disability – to develop treatment strategies based on innovative neurotechnologies tailored to the individual patient, away from imprecision and towards precision medicine," says Friedhelm Hummel. "Furthermore, we will exploit the unique opportunities we have in Sion with cutting-edge laboratories and excellent scientific expertise in direct proximity to large number of patients within an environment of excellent clinical expertise.”