Improving in vitro models to study the human intestine
IBEC’s Biomimetic Systems for Cell Engineering group has published a review about possible new strategies to study drug absorption in the intestine in the high-ranking journal Trends in Molecular Medicine.
IBEC’s Together with their collaborators at the Universidade do Porto, Elena Martinez’s group examines the current state-of-the-art of cell-based intestinal models, which have been used for drug absorption and metabolism studies since the 1980s. However, current models, which use Caco-2 cells derived from human intestinal tumors, are not fully representative of the human small intestine.
IBEC group leader Pere Roca-Cusachs is the Journal of Cell Science’s ‘cell scientist to watch’ in its current edition.
The European Commission has published its proposal for the next framework programme in research and innovation, 
A review by IBEC group leader and ICREA research professor Xavier Trepat is one of six featured in Nature Physics’ latest ‘Insight’ issue, ‘The Physics of Living Systems’, in which all the articles have been co-authored by a physicist and a biologist.
IBEC is listed as an ‘outstanding’ Spanish research centre for Horizon 2020 funding in a recent report published by the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI). 