The EMBL-IBEC Winter Conference comes to an end with a huge success in terms of participation
This week, the conference organised by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) brought together a total of 200 international experts in the field of bioengineering at La Pedrera building in Barcelona.
At the opening of the event, which was led by the mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, attention was drawn to Barcelona’s consolidation as an international centre of research and knowledge.
The institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS), a research institute of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), have signed the first agreement between the two institutes to foster their collaboration. Both research centres share similarities such as their multidisciplinarity, their active missions to connect with industry and clinicians, and a strong research in nanomedicine, chemical biology, chip technology, regenerative medicine and tissue engineering. This institutional alliance will allow to share resources, knowledge and provide mobility programs. 
A group of researchers from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) leads the European project BLOC, an initiative led by researchers Javier Ramón and Irene Marco that seeks to evaluate the response to different drugs in metabolic diseases using organ-in-a- chip by using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). For this, the consortium will have a budget of almost 3 million euros, financed by the Horizon 2020 FET Open program.
Raimon Jané, President of the Spanish Society of Biomedical Engineering (SEIB), Group Leader of the Bioengineering Institute of Catalonia (IBEC) and CIBER-BBN, inaugurated the conference with the Health Minister of the Government of Cantabria, the Dean of the University of Cantabria, the Director of the Hospital and the President of the CASEIB2019 Organising Committee.
The 2019 PhD Retreat gathered more than 50 PhD students in the astonishing town of Les Mines d’Osor (Girona). This edition’s scope included the themes of communication, art and mental health in science with a series of talks and workshops that fostered collaboration and networking among IBEC researchers and the BIST community. 
