CitBIO – Center for Intestinal Absorption and Transport of Biopharmaceuticals – is funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation’s Challenge Programme with a total budget of 60 mill. DKK over a six-year period up to the year 2023.
The main partners in CitBIO are Harvard Medical School and Boston’s Children’s Hospital (USA), Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences (Australia), and DTU Health Tech. The center is headed by Prof. Thomas L. Andresen from DTU Health Tech. The grant from NNF finances the research carried out by junior and senior researchers along with essential state-of-the-art experimental equipment. In addition, other researchers are independently financed stake-holders in CitBIO’s research program. Thus, more than 25 people – and counting – contribute towards the goals of the center.
CitBIO combines basic and applied research with the aim of increasing bioavailability of orally administrated drugs through innovative peptide engineering and nanotechnologies. CitBIO encompasses a broad interdisciplinary research profile consisting of chemists, biologists, material scientists, microscopists, and medical doctors along with both experimental and theoretical physicists. This allows for application of a wide palette of scientific techniques, including chemical syntheses, biophysical assays, artificial model systems of the intestine, optical microscopy, theoretical modeling, and animal studies, enabling detailed mechanistic studies of drug candidates.