New IBEC group leader Nuria Montserrat is featured in an article in El Mundo today. The story discusses her ERC grant, the work she has been doing generating “mini-kidneys” from human pluripotent stem cells, and how she will continue this important line of research at IBEC.
IBEC group leader and director of CMRB Ángel Raya is featured as one of four researchers making notable advances in regenerative medicine in a story in Diario Medico todayThe article includes interviews with researchers from New York, Munich and Rome, who alongside Ángel attended a conference organised by the Areces Foundation and the Nature Group last week in Madrid.
Gabriel Gomila, IBEC group leader and Associate Professor at the UB, has received an ICREA Academia Prize 2014 for excellence in research and capacity for leadership.Bestowed annually by the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) to encourage university professionals with an outstanding research career to stay in the Catalan university system, this year’s list of 30 winners is made up of 10 researchers from the UB, 8 from the UAB, 6 from the UPC, 3 from the UPF, 2 from Universitat de Girona and one from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili.
Last week, IBEC Director Josep Samitier was named new president of the Associació Catalana d’Entitats de Recerca (ACER).Josep takes the reins from IFCO director Lluís Torner, who has held the position since 2009. The association’s first President was the Hon. Mr. Andreu Mas-Colell. The other members of the Director’s Board are ICAC’s Joan Gómez Pallarès (Secretary), Ramon Gomis (IDIBAPS), Jordi Galí (CREI) and Josep M. Monfort (IRTA) as members.
Today El Mundo features a short article about IBEC’s involvement in the European project Plantoid, which aims aims to design and develop robots inspired by plants.
A new group leader at IBEC brings one of the most prestigious funding awards, an ERC Starting Grant, to continue her research into kidney regenerationNuria Montserrat (Barcelona, 1978) is one of just eight young researchers in Catalonia to have received a prestigious European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant at the end of 2014.
Researchers at IBEC reveal in a Nature Communications paper some surprising mechanics that drive epithelial gap closure in the absence of underlying layersIn a collaboration with their colleagues at the Mechanobiology Institute in Singapore, IBEC researchers have demonstrated that a kind of ‘tug-of-war’ takes place after our skin or other epithelial layer is damaged, particularly in cases where the tissue is chronicly or deeply injured.
Researchers in Barcelona discover more potential candidates on the route to tailored, photo-switchable therapies by disproving design limitationLast year, scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), IRB Barcelona and the UB announced that they had achieved photo-switchable, or light-regulated, molecules to control protein-protein interactions – key determinants in biological processes, and therefore highly promising therapeutic targets – in a remote and non-invasive way.
A group at IBEC has identified a important factor in E. coli infection, opening the way to developing targeted drugs against the potentially deadly condition.Most E. coli bacterial strains occur naturally in the human gut and pose no harm to health, except for the one particular serotype that always hits the news, O157:H7, which can cause food poisoning and can become life-threatening in certain patients.
– The EU-funded MySpine project completes its goal of developing prognosis technology for spinal problemsEven though lower back pain and spinal disorders are the leading cause of disability in western countries, their treatment still leaves a lot to be desired.