Targeted drug delivery: fundamental aspects and translational applications Silvia Muro, IBEC The design of strategies to enable efficient and safe delivery of therapeutic agents to areas of the body requiring intervention is an active research field. Therapeutic targets are often confined to specific regions or tissues in the body, where access may require active transport ... Read more
Improving lung cancer management by reengineering tumor-associated fibroblasts Jordi Alcaraz, UB facultat de Medicina & IBEC Associated Researcher Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death due in part to subtoptimal patient responses to current therapies, which have been largely designed to targeting cancer cell abnormalities. However, there is a paradigm shift in cancer ... Read more
Breaking Paradigms: Delivering insulin orally Ester Caffarel, MIT Biologics have revolutionized disease treatment; however, their rapid degradation and poor absorption in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract generally limit their administration to parenteral routes. Devices for the oral delivery of biologics must aid in both localization and permeation to achieve systemic drug uptake. For this purpose, we ... Read more
Membraneless compartments based on intrinsically disordered proteins: from biology towards new protein materials Paolo Arosio, Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering, ETH Zurich In the last few years, discoveries in biology are revealing that a class of intrinsically disordered protein sequences plays an important role in the formation of cellular membraneless compartments by spontaneous liquid-liquid phase ... Read more
Diabetes, where are we? Anna Novials, PI of the group “Pathogenesis and Prevention of Diabetes” at IDIBAPS/Clinic Hospital of Barcelona and member of CIBERDEM network. Diabetes mellitus (DM) is a group of chronic metabolic disorders all characterized by hyperglycemia. It occurs either when the pancreas does not produce enough insulin or when the peripheral tissues ... Read more
Study on the of the interplay between glucose metabolism and SARS-CoV-2 infection exploiting human kidney organoids Núria Montserrat, group leader "Pluripotency for organ regeneration" at IBEC Severe acute respiratory syndrome 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection leads to a high risk of hospitalization and mortality in diabetic patients. SARS-CoV-2 binds to angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor, which is ... Read more
A new molecular dimension: exploiting Raman spectroscopy in Biomedicine Mónica Marro, ICFO, The Institute of Photonic Sciences Raman spectroscopy is a promising optical technique that enables the investigation of the molecular content of biological samples in a rapid, non-invasive, label-free and multiplexed approach. In the biomedical field, it is of special interest because the device ... Read more
Tissue Engineering in Microgravity Jessica Ilenburg, Gravitational Biotechnologist at Yuri gravity Tissue Engineering and regenerative medicine are two fast growing and fast moving research fields. With the invention of bioprinting and tissue chips two breakthrough innovations have been made and now research in microgravity (for example on the ISS) promises even more and faster progress. ... Read more
Nanomalaria group: 20 years at IBEC Xavier Fernàndez-Busques, group leader of the Nanomalaria group at IBEC We will start by briefly looking at the origins of our group back in 2001 as part of IBEC’s embryo, the Research Center for Bioelectronics and Nanobioscience. Our current activities integrate two decades of cumulative research oriented to the ... Read more
Electrochemically Gated Charge Transport in Redox Proteins and Photosynthetic Complexes Pau Gorostiza, group leader of the Nanoprobes and nanoswitches group at IBEC Interprotein electron transport is an essential process in cell respiration and photosynthesis. It takes place between redox proteins and complexes, and it displays an outstanding efficiency and environmental adaptability. Although the biochemistry of ... Read more