Pere Joan Cardona, recognized for research into tuberculosis vaccine

Pere Joan Cardona, head of the experimental tuberculosis unit at the Institute of the Germans Trias i Pujol (IGTP), has been recognized by the Ramón Pla Armengol Foundation for his research into the therapeutic tuberculosis vaccine. The panel of judges that awarded him the prize, endowed with €40,000, highlighted the social impact and transfer component of his research, as Dr. Cardona is involved in the business management of producing the new drug. In addition to being the co-inventor of the RUTI tuberculosis vaccine and promoting its business development, Pere Joan Cardona is also the founder and CEO of Manremyc, a start-up that produces probiotics to prevent tuberculosis. 

This is the first edition of these awards created to support biomedical research in the field of respiratory health. At the same session, Antoni Torres, head of the group on management and prevention of infectious, interstitial and tumoral lung diseases at the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) and head of the intensive respiratory care unit at Hospital Clínic Barcelona, was awarded a €70,000 prize for his research project Predictors of early readmission in acute exacerbation of COPD, after an international review process managed by AQuAS and coordinated by the Barcelona Respiratory Network (BRN).

These awards were given out during the scientific debate Personalized Respiratory Medicine. Exploring the Horizon, organized by B·Debate, an initiative of Biocat and the “la Caixa” Foundation, and by the BRN foundation, in collaboration with the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (AJRCCM).

The B·Debate session on personalized respiratory medicine brought together more than twenty international experts at CaixaFòrum to discuss the current state of respiratory diseases. 600,000 people in Europe die each year from this type of pathology and this number is expected to increase in the future. The most prevalent diseases of the respiratory system are asthma, COPD, lung cancer, sleep disturbances and viral and bacterial infections like the flu and community-acquired pneumonia, respectively.

The debates, held on 12 and 13 June under the scientific leadership of Dr. Àlvar Agustí, director of the Hospital Clínic Barcelona Thorax Institute and president of the BRN, brought together specialists like Dr. Jacob I. Szanjder, chief of the Division of Medicine-Pulmonary at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago (USA), and Dr. Edwin Silverman, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (USA), who launched the first division of network medicine in the world at Harvard University. The session on 13 June was a symposium open to the Catalan scientific community and attracted nearly 150 participants.

More information is available on the B·Debate website.