The winners of the second edition of the Pasqual Maragall’s grants programme visit the BBRC

Dr. Silvia De Santis and Dr. Alberto Rábano, winners of the second edition of the Pasqual Maragall Researchers Programme (PMRP), have visited the Barcelonaβeta Brain Research (BBRC), the research centre of the Foundation, to present their main lines of work and discuss the latest advances in the field.

Dr. Silvia De Santis, head of the Translational Imaging Biomarkers group at the Alicante Institute of Neurosciences of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), has given a talk on non-invasive biomarkers of neurodegeneration and neuroinflammation processes, entitled 'Leveraging diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging to characterise inflammation in healthy ageing and degeneration'.

For his part, Dr. Alberto Rábano, director of the Tissue Bank of the Neurological Diseases Research Centre (CIEN Foundation), has contributed with a session on the GADIR project ('The GADIR Project: challenge for brain banks in Spain and Portugal'), an ambitious effort aimed at the genomic characterisation of thousands of brains in Spain and Portugal with a complete and updated neuropathological assessment.

The talks have been held within the framework of the BBRC Scientific Seminars, seminars that the Pasqual Maragall Foundation’s research centre organises periodically with the aim of creating a space to share current and future challenges in neuroscience among the scientific community. The seminars are given by leading experts from around the world in neuroimaging, genetics, biomedicine and biostatistics, among other disciplines, and are open to researchers and research support staff from research institutions in the area.