What the agreement between the MinCyT and a foundation says to alleviate the effects of the pandemic

The arrival of the COVID-19 coronavirus took the population by surprise and forced science, technology and the world of health to work against the clock in search of solutions to lessen the negative impact of the disease on people’s lives.

In this context, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation, the National Agency for the Promotion of Research, Technological Development and Innovation and the Bunge y Born Foundation signed a Memorandum of Understanding in order to join efforts to mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in our country.

Aiming to improve national response capacity to the new disease caused by the coronavirus, both institutions will contribute $ 37,566,010 to co-finance scientific and technological research projects, whose purpose is to provide knowledge to resolve the effects of the new disease that frightens the world.

The projects to be financed will be selected among the Project Ideas, an initiative also of the Ministry of Science and Technology, whose objective was to improve the national capacity to respond to the Pandemic in Argentina, be it for diagnosis, control, prevention, treatment, monitoring or other aspects related to COVID-19.

In this sense, those projects that obtained the highest marks in their academic quality and technological viability and that could not be financed for exceeding the maximum execution period established in that contest will have a new possibility.

During the signing ceremony, the minister Roberto Salvarezza He stressed the importance of having the support of the Bunge y Born Foundation “which will contribute 18 million pesos, and that together with the contribution of the Agency, we will be able to finance ten projects of the highest quality that had been in the call and that nevertheless due to a deadline issue, they could not be financed ”.

In this line, the president of the Agency, Fernando PeiranoHe added that “this agreement represents a complementary action to what we have already been able to do in support of initiatives emerged from our innovation system to respond to the pandemic that has unleashed the coronavirus: it will allow us to expand the portfolio of solutions or capabilities that we are promoting in this context ”. Through this Memorandum with the Bunge y Born Foundation, “the Agency achieves that no good idea is left without support and we continue to expand the response capacity in the face of the pandemic,” he said.

“The scientific community reacted very positively, many scientists are putting aside their usual scientific agenda and joining a fight to solve a problem that affects the health of our country,” said for his part, the Secretary for Scientific-Technological Articulation, Juan Pablo Paz. . He also stressed the relevance of this initiative “that enhances public-private interaction” and that will finance projects “that tend to generate tools to improve treatments and different technologies that serve the population’s health care.”

At the end, the executive director of the Bunge y Born Foundation, Gerardo della Paolera, referred to the importance of the agreement signed because “it supports ten research projects under the actions of mitigating COVID-19 that has penetrated our country and that they are medium-term projects that will have a decisive impact on the treatment of the virus ”. “The Bunge y Born Foundation has always been committed to supporting public goods and particularly science, where Argentina obviously has a caliber of human capital that is rarely seen in other countries,” he concluded.