Our photo shows the President of France, Francois Hollande, announcing a new initiative which involves our customers Professor Colin McGuckin and Dr Nico Forraz.

Their company CTI Biotech specialises in research into cell therapy and regenerative medicine. It was founded by Colin and Nico, who have used our controlled rate freezers in France and in England.

President Hollande visited Dijon on the 11th of March and announced the launch of Project IMODI . It will receive 13.4 million euros investment under the Futures programme. IMODI stands for "Innovative Models Initiative" and it aims to create the first national network dedicated to personalised medicine in oncology. The project includes large companies such as Sanofi, four SMEs including CTI along with key academic institutions.

CTI 's mission in this is cell model development and they will install (at Meyzieu near Lyon) a national biobank for over 40,000 samples - available to all the project partners.  Mr Francois Hollande who met Professor McGuckin and Dr Forraz, came to meet the participants for this enterprise which will hopefully produce tomorrow's drugs to treat cancer and other diseases.