In 2013 research will be financed with 3 million euros to give answers to people with multiple sclerosis, to grant them a better way of life and new treatments today and a definitive cure to this disease, together with finding its cause, tomorrow. On www.aism.it rules and application forms for requests of financing can be found.

Thanks to the significative contribution by Italians who decided to finance AISM with its Foundation FISM, devolving it their 5x1000 tax quota, this year the Foundation will again be able to give to research 3 million euros. “With this grant we confirm the role of AISM in sustaining the research and promoting the involvement of talented researchers in the MS research field, with the goal to give answers to people with MS” says FISM president Mario Alberto Battaglia.

Download FISM Call 2013

The 2013 grant will finance research projects that emerged in excellence and innovation, aspiring to give an important contribution into finding the cause of the disease but also new treatments and making life better for affected people. Annual, biennial and triennial projects will be financed, together with annual pilot projects. The latter aim to allow the researcher to run new preliminary studies in an innovative research field that will be able to open new roads to explore.

FISM for the researchers
There are training grants for new graduates and research grants for the ones who are already able to carry on autonomously a project with innovative research qualities.

For the annual grant, AISM and its Foundation FISM pay great attention to help talented researchers in their scientific growth. Besides grants for Italy and foreign countries, the Foundation promotes a programme named after Rita Levi Montalcini, former honorary president of the Association. This financing programme was created to help Italian researchers come back from abroad or to allow them to transfer to excellence institutes in the country. It is reserved to researchers who are well established internationally, who specialize in an area specific to MS and carry on an autonomous research programme. At the end of the grant the Foundation, together with the Institute that is hosting the researcher, will evaluate the possibility to adopt the researcher offering him or her to go on in his or her career in Multiple Sclerosis.

Special programmes
Out of the grant, FISM is also promoting and financing, with dedicated funds, its “Special programmes”, on broad, particularly important and innovative subjects that involve more researchers from various centres and national or international excellence networks. In this field AISM and its foundation are involved internationally to find new strategies to treat progressive forms of the disease and paediatric multiple sclerosis.

FISM is also interested in receiving proposals for special programmes by researchers and institutions at any time of year.

AISM and research
AISM and its Foundation finance 70 per cent of Italian research on MS and they are the third financers in this field in the world.

Since 1997, AISM and FISM have financed a total of 295 researchers on MS. It can be considered a real, established school, that is leaving its mark on a national and international level. The fact that 76 per cent of financed researchers keep working on MS proves the capacity of AISM research to attract, sustain and help the best researchers during their career.

Italian Association for Multiple Sclerosis, together with its Foundation, is the only organization in Italy that works in the Multiple Sclerosis field in an all-comprehensive way, to promote, direct and finance the scientific research, to promote and erogate sanitary and social services on national and local level, to represent and confirm the rights of the 65 thousand Italians who suffer from the disease and help them be totally autonomous and involved.

For any information on the grant please check the website www.aism.it or write FISM at the email fism@aism.it