An open letter that underlines the importance of continuing the consolidated and mutually beneficial cooperation between the EU and Switzerland in the field of research and innovation, currently limited by the fact that the Swiss Confederation is considered a "third country" not associated with the Horizon Europe framework program and its initiatives and programmes.

Cellular senescence in different tissues of the human organism is one of the causes of aging and related diseases, such as cancer, kidney, heart, and muscle failure. Preventing the formation of these cells or selectively eliminating them could therefore be the key weapon against several diseases. This is the intuition of a multidisciplinary group involving scientists and clinicians in Ticino and Switzerland, leading them to receive an important grant from the Swiss National Fund to pursue research on the molecular mechanisms underlying cellular senescence and to develop potential clinical applications of new molecules capable of inhibiting or eliminating these cells.

In autumn 2021 a new Centre for biomedical reseach will be inaugurated in Bellinzona. To support this event, Ticino Management features a special series of articles presenting the activities of the two main residents of the facility, IRB and IOR. In this article eight group leaders at the IRB tell us more about what they do in their respective research labs.

During the 10th Giornata della Ricerca della Svizzera italiana (Research Day of the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland), which took place on June 25 at the Lugano East Campus, Ente Ospedaliero Cantonale (EOC) and Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) officially presented the new EOC-USI Research Fund. The Fund's mission is to support biomedical research to ensure effective, appropriate and efficient treatment, to support innovation and to enhance the results of research performed by researchers working at the two institutions.

Researchers from the Prostate Cancer Biology laboratory, directed by Giuseppina Carbone, M.D., at the Institute of Oncology Research (IOR, affiliated to USI) in Bellinzona, have discovered an unexpected mechanism that drives the largest group of prostate tumors' evolution, the ERG fusion-positive prostate cancers. The study is published.

It is a major threat to hundreds of plant species. Present in Europe since 2014, the Japanese beetle ( Popillia japonica ) was first spotted at the southern Swiss border in 2017. To prevent it from spreading further in our country and in Europe, Agroscope, the Swiss competence centre for agronomic research, has just launched an innovative interactive online map, developed with the contribution of the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA USI-SUPSI) to record and report the presence of the insect in Ticino.

Thanks to a science communication project on and . Giovani e Media , the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI) and USI have produced four educational video clips to help us understand how digital applications and social media use personal data.

As in the city of Leonia imagined by Calvino, brand-new consumer goods are repurchased every day accumulating ever more impressive mountains of waste. We never ask ourselves, "where the garbage men take their load every day?". We live in a constant state of oblivion and distraction regarding the issue of environmental protection. Has any action against climate change been slowed down by the concept of "men at the centre of everything"- Or could this concept boost the protection of our ecosystem? And again, what can we do to optimise our actions and rethink our paradigms?