Newswise — The Human Health Foundation (HHF), a nonprofit organization designed to develop and fund biomedical research in Italy will be introduced on July 15th during this year's annual Spoleto Festival by Antonio Giordano, MD, PhD, president and founder of the Sbarro Health Research Organization (http://www.shro.org).
Funding for cancer research and other diseases has proven a problem for many Italian scientists, creating a widely acknowledged 'brain drain' among post-docs and researchers who leave to find funding for their work in other countries, most notably the United States.
"Available money often goes to only a few Italian research centers, creating an 'oasis' in a desert," says Giordano, who will serve as director of the scientific advisory board for HHF. "We hope to improve this situation in a way that is fair, balanced and based on initiative and merit."
HHF was founded by the Banca di Popolare di Spoleto (http://www.bpspoleto.it), a major corporate sponsor of the world-famous Spoleto Festival, a celebration of the arts held in the Umbria region of Italy during the first two weeks of July.
"As a public institution, we have to protect our clients' money, but we also want to be involved in socially conscious investing.
With this in mind, the board and I felt it was important to contribute not only to the arts, but also to the sciences," says Giovannino Antonini PhD., president of the Spoleto bank.
Along with developing new medical research centers, HHF will promote and support novel methods for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer and other illnesses; implement and design new initiatives to exchange and spread the results of new research; and design original programs to inform and increase public awareness of health and ethical issues that involve scientific research and cancer prevention.
In a country where statistics on biomedical funding and accountability have been hard to come by, Giordano stresses that all of the HHF funds will be carefully monitored and accounted for, and "that the highest ethical commitment and responsibility will be placed on distributing funds."
"Our foundation will operate with complete budgetary transparency," says Giordano. "We will utilize peer review and other initiatives pioneered and widely applied in the American system of grants to be sure that the most qualified research is funded based on merit."
Sbarro Health Research Organization (SHRO) funds innovative and dedicated clinicians, molecular biologists, geneticists and chemists who seek to diagnose and cure cancer and cardiovascular conditions by identifying and studying the underlying molecular mechanisms of these diseases. The Organization also funds work on the links between obesity and cancer along with a new molecular therapeutics program that will spur the application of the newest discoveries to useful drug or diagnostic therapies for a wide range of diseases.
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