The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST Association) runs an EU-funded programme that encourages researchers and innovators to create research networks called COST Actions. The EU-CardioRNA COST Action, launched in 2018, is intended to promote transcriptomics research in cardiovascular disease. In February there were 168 participants in the EU-CardioRNA action.
The EU-CardioRNA COST Action is divided into four working groups:
- WG1 – “Regulatory function of the transcriptome”
- WG2 – “Best practices and experimental standards”
- WG3 – “Development of cohort inventory”
- WG4 – “Dissemination”
WG3 is working towards deploying an inventory of available cohorts and biobanks classified according to the type of the cardiovascular disease (CVDs) in a user-friendly way. The most important features of the biobanks to be collected in the inventory will be codified to release a publicly searchable database populated with the appropriate details of the cohorts with a web-based framework.
Opportunities and activities include early career investigator 3-month scientific missions (STSMs) including infrastructure and samples sharing between COST Action labs as well as small grants to attend international meetings.
Three EU-CardioRNA COST Action WG meetings were held between February 2019 and February 2020. A comprehensive meeting report that describes the content, discussions and highlights of scientific sessions has recently been published in the journal non-coding RNA. The report describes the working group sessions of the following meetings:
- The Second EU-CardioRNA Working Group Meeting, Lisbon, Portugal
- The Third EU-CardioRNA Working Group Meeting, Istanbul, Turkey
- The Fourth Working Group and Management Committee, Maastricht, The Netherlands
“With the growing number of participants with diverse skills, knowledge and approaches, WG meetings have been given focus, with two themes per meeting, and with the aim of focusing on key unmet questions and needs in translational cardiovascular research. Through the scientific sessions and roundtable discussions, the Action brings together researchers from different disciplines and backgrounds to catalyse the progress in using transcriptomics and ncRNA research to further knowledge, understanding, diagnostic and prognostic tools and treatments for CVD. We look forward to another year with new as well as familiar faces, of successful collaborations and scientific exchange within EU-CardioRNA,” concluded the authors on behalf of the EU-CardioRNA COST Action.
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