Under the name of “Modern approaches for developing antivirals against SARS-CoV 2” (MAD-CoV 2) the project focuses on the development and delivery of therapeutic tools for the current COVID-19 outbreak.
Now, Riccardo Levato, former researcher at IBEC, has been awarded with an ERC starting grant at UMC Utrecht to develop his project named “VOLUME-BIO”.
The holidays are over and it’s time to go back to work, also for our youngest and curious minds of the students that visit us every year. Despite the situation we are experiencing due to the coronavirus outbreak, at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) we are making an effort to resume some of our outreach activities in person. In this sense, the IBEC laboratories have reopened the doors for the students participating in the “Bojos per la Bioenginyeria” and the “Batx2Lab” programs, adapting to this “new normality”.
The results will be translated into a device that will recreate the tumor environment from cancer cells derived from patients, as well as a new technology that will allow to visualize how physical forces affect the nuclei of metastatic cells.
In a recent paper led by Ulm University in Germany and co-authored and co-led by Demestre, researchers describe the effect of SHANK3 protein on muscle tissues of patients with autism disorder.
IBEC researchers Irene Marco and Núria Torras, together with eight more female scientists, have won the programme “To the Mothers of Science” organized by The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), supporting them along the way to greater responsibility positions.
The project led by IBEC researcher Elena Lantero from Nanomalaria IBEC-ISGlobal Joint Group, gets funding from CaixaImpulse Validate program to develop a new technology for rapid, cheap and efficient diagnosis of a disease which threats millions of people worldwide.Despite being preventable and treatable, malaria is an infectious disease that threatens the life of 3.2 billion people globally. Only in 2018, an estimated 228 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide, accounting for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The Catalan Government announced yesterday the Narcís Monturiol Medal award for scientific and technological merit to the Director of the IBEC, Josep Samitier Martí, for his contribution to the development of the Catalan system of science and technology. In total, ten researchers from the Catalan knowledge system (six men and four women) have received this distinction, as well as a research center that has been awarded the Narcís Monturiol Plaque, which recognizes an institution in the country.
The Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) has overcome the number of 16k followers on social networks, an impressive increase of 50% since May 2019. Thanks to the new Instagram account and to intensive communicative efforts of the communication unit and the research groups, IBEC is more connected than ever. Social networks represent a global phenomenon which has radically change many aspects of communication, also in science. According to AAAS, the number of Americans going online for scientific information increased from 20% to 47% between 2006 and 2014.
Pere Roca-Cusachs, group leader at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and associate professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona (UB), has been chosen to join the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) , a prestigious network that brings together some of the most brilliant researchers in the world. Roca-Cusachs is a pioneer in Europe in the mechanobiology field and in the study of how physical forces affect diseases such as cancer.