The Center for Cooperative Research in Biomaterials, CIC biomaGUNE, has signed a research contract worth 225,000 euros with Abbott, an international biomedical company that specialises in pharmaceutical, nutritional, health-care and diagnostic products, to study the effect of diet on memory and the ageing process using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography (PET) techniques in animal models (rats and mice).

Abbott's Nutrition division develops and markets clinically proven nutritional products to meet the dietary needs of people with critical diseases or special nutritional needs. Abbott hopes to be able to take advantage of the understanding and technological capacity available at CIC biomaGUNE's Molecular Imaging Unit in order to incorporate the aforementioned research techniques into behavioural studies in preclinical models.

This study will allow the effect of a specific diet on brain development and spatial memory, and on certain aspects of the ageing process, to be determined more accurately and enable this new understanding to be applied to the development of new dietary products in the future.

CIC biomaGUNE's Molecular Imaging Unit will undertake anatomical and functional studies using PET- and MRI-based techniques, and will correlate its findings with those obtained from the behavioural studies. This study is expected to provide reliable and validated results that should allow Abbott Nutrition to better understand the effect of certain diets on spatial and episodic memory. Three of the centre's research groups will take part in this project.

CIC biomaGUNE's Molecular Imaging Unit is equipped with cutting-edge technology, thus making it one of the leading European centres for biomedical imaging research in a preclinical context. Its facilities were inaugurated on 12 July 2011, and it is recognised by the Spanish government as a Singular Scientific-Technical Facility (ICTS).