Sarah Moreira 
The 7th edition of the Premis Emprenedors Digitals (Digital Entrepreneur Awards), organised by the Catalunya Ràdio programme, took place on Wednesday 18 June at the Antigua Fábrica Damm in Barcelona. The award recognises companies that have demonstrated exceptional growth and innovation in their field.
On 18 June, the CCCB hosted the closing ceremony of the programme, which offered an intense schedule of debates, artistic activities and meetings open to the public over the course of five months. These events aimed to explore how science will transform the world in the coming decades.
The work, led by a team from the CSIC and IDIBELL, with the collaboration of IBEC, manages to visualise how embryonic cells eliminate bacterial infections, before the formation of the immune system. The research describes a mechanism of phagocytosis similar to that used by white blood cells, and reveals that this mechanism is also present in human embryos.
Today marked the fourth annual conference of the Interdisciplinary Group of Health Professionals (GIPS), which featured the collaboration of the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) this year. The event welcomed over 150 attendees from clinical, academic, institutional, and technological backgrounds, and aimed to strengthen interdisciplinary collaboration and promote innovation in health.
This is an analysis on an unprecedented scale. They studied over 140,000 versions of the Aβ42 peptide, which forms harmful plaques in the brain. It is the first map to reveal how mutations affect a protein in its transition state — a fleeting phase that is difficult to study. This finding opens up new avenues for preventing Alzheimer’s disease and suggests a method that can be applied to studying other proteins involved in different pathologies. The study, published in Science Advances, is a collaboration between the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom, the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, and the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona.
HeLa et al. is an audiovisual work developed by Tess Marschner during her artistic residency at IBEC between 2023 and 2024. It is currently touring international film and contemporary art festivals. This collaboration has enriched the way IBEC communicates science, helping the institute’s research to cross borders.
A study by Stanford University and the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia describes an innovative technology that enables the large-scale analysis of antibodies in biological samples. Using microscopic beads marked with stable isotopes, this advance surpasses traditional techniques, accelerating the study of immune responses and opening up new possibilities for biomedical research.
The NanoMed Europe 2025 conference, Europe’s leading event in the field of nanomedicine and advanced health technologies, took place from 27 to 30 May. This edition was hosted in Barcelona, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of the Spanish Nanomedicine Platform (NANOMED Spain), which is coordinated by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC). Since its establishment in 2005, NANOMED Spain has collaborated closely with the European Technology Platform for Nanomedicine (ETPN) to encourage nanomedicine innovation in Spain and across Europe.
IBEC and ISGlobal researchers led a study that points towards protein aggregation as a possible target to find new ways to reduce the viability of Plasmodium falciparum, the main causing agent of malaria. By inducing protein aggregation, they observed considerable disorders in protein homeostasis and a significant reduction in parasite growth. The results position protein aggregation control as a promising target for antimalarial therapies.
The Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) is participating in the international SOLFEGE project, which aims to explore how different cell types coordinate with each other through soluble factors in the tumour microenvironment. This project has been made possible thanks to funding from the Human Frontier Science Program. SOLFEGE is a consortium led by the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), with IBEC and the Duke University, as partners.