The neuroscientist and Nobel prize winner Rita Levi Montalcini (1909-2012) founded EBRI in 2002 as a research center on neurological and neurodegenerative diseases. Credit: Riccardo De Luca/ AP Photo/Alamy Stock Photo.
The new year did not start well for the European Brain Research Institute (EBRI), a private non-profit research centre in Rome founded by Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini. When the 2024 budget law was approved at the end of December, EBRI researchers immediately noticed that it did not include the €1 million funding that the centre has received annually for the past 10 years and which it needs to cover its running costs.
“The cut would make it impossible to continue research and to cover structural costs, such as the implementation and maintenance of laboratories and equipment,” explains EBRI’s president Antonino Cattaneo. “These costs cannot be covered by research grants.”
Founded in 2002 by Rita Levi-Montalcini, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1986, EBRI investigates mechanisms underlying neurological and neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, chronic pain, as well as rare genetic diseases. EBRI has generated drug candidates of therapeutic interest that are being developed for clinical testing in humans. Based in the campus of Sapienza University in Rome, EBRI hosts 13 research groups, ten laboratories and three facilities, and has about 60 core staff including researchers and technicians, in addition to doctoral students.
Levi-Montalcini did not leave an endowment. Before 2012, EBRI received funding for its running costs from the Italian ministry through various funding schemes. Afterwards, it started receiving €1 million per year as part of the state budget law, that was renewed every three years and labelled as an ‘extraordinary’ contribution. Cattaneo says the term is “inappropriate” and hinders the institute’s ability to plan research and recruitment.
The reason behind the disappearance of funds for EBRI from this year’s bill is not clear, says Cattaneo. A spokesman for the ministry for universities and research (MUR) told Nature Italy that the decision was taken in parliament and the ministry had not been aware of it.
In early January, after EBRI issued a statement announcing that the institute would have to shut down unless the cut was reversed, Cattaneo had a meeting with Marcella Panucci, head of the MUR cabinet and the MUR minister Anna Maria Bernini. According to a press release that followed the meeting, the ministry has promised to find a solution and has guaranteed that EBRI will receive around €1 million to cover its 2024 costs as soon as possible – but because a new law is needed to allocate the funds, the timing will depend on the parliament’s calendar.
“I appreciate the interest and understanding shown by the ministry,” says Cattaneo, who adds that EBRI should be guaranteed long-term structural funding that recognizes its strategic role, rather than being given an emergency fix. "We have scheduled a meeting with the minister to illustrate what we've accomplished and our future plans".
The cancellation of funds “was an incomprehensible act of short-sightedness” comments Vittorio Gallese, who researches neuroscience at the University of Parma, who says that closing the institute would mean forcing it to return all the funding received from international agencies through competitive grants, thereby interrupting national and international collaborations and current clinical trials. “EBRI is a centre of excellence and this oversight is a concern for the whole field” adds Luciano Fadiga, a neuroscientist at the University of Ferrara and the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa.
