The welcome address was given by Dr. Jernej Stromajer,  State Secretary within the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of Slovenia. At the meeting several important points in line with the presently ongoing Phase1 of the SEEIIST Design Phase were discussed. Further plans and the next steps important for the development of the project were defined. The importance of SEEIIST having obtained a legal status as a Swiss Association with seat in Geneva was emphasized, which enabled SEEIIST to apply directly as a beneficiary partner for EU projects.  Two important applications were highlighted: 1) HITRI – the Hadron Ion Therapy Research Infrastructure project through the EU H2020 INFRADEV-01-2019-2020 Design Study Call and 2) ‘TREASURE for Fighting Cancer’ project via MC-ITN call H2020-MSCA-ITN-2020.

The SEEIIST SC meeting was preceded by a special ‘Expert meeting’ held at the Institute Jozef Stefan, Ljubljana, and organized by the Slovenian Academy of Engineering in cooperation with the Institute Jozef Stefan. The objective of the ‘Expert meeting’ was to discuss activities and competitiveness of the Slovenian technical, medical and business communities for the SEEIIST Project which is complementary to the planned national Slovenian proton therapy centar (SIPTC). During the meeting, the complementarity of the two projects and their synergy were identified and clearly emphasized, since the much simpler proton therapy center could be considered to be the first phase of the much larger and more complex SEEIIST Project which would offer beyond protons also treatment with a wide spectrum of heavy ions (Carbon-ions and others) together with attractive and even necessary cancer research on the DNA level. The detailed information about the event is available under the following website:

http://indico.ijs.si/event/ptInSlovenia

Source