Institutional news

The Spanish Platform for Nanomedicine (NanoMedSpain), managed by IBEC, is participating once again in the Annual Conference of Technological Platforms of Biomedical Research in Barcelona today and tomorrow.

This yearly conference, organised by the four national platforms – Innovative Medicines, Nanomedicine, Health Technology and Biotechnology Markets – presents the latest advances in -omics technology and digitalization in the health sector from the standpoint of biomedical research.

The seven BIST centres – including IBEC – have a stand at this year’s Youth Mobile Festival (YoMo), part of the Mobile World Congress that’s taking place this week.

The stand will feature different hands-on activities on different days, all of which will be based on the research being carried out in the BIST centres.

More than 15,000 youngsters are expected to pass through the festival, which is being held at La Farga in l’Hospitalet, during the festival’s run from today to Friday.

This was the moment that IBEC group leader Pere Roca-Cusachs received the City of Barcelona Award for the life sciences from Barcelona mayor Ada Colau.

The ceremony took place last night in the city council’s Saló de Cent, where the twenty winners of this year’s prizes, now in their 17th edition, were congratulated by Ms. Colau and Culture Commissioner Joan Subirats.

The prestigious City of Barcelona awards recognize outstanding creativity and research carried out in Barcelona that contribute to culture and society in the city.

Last Thursday evening saw the PCB’s Dolors Aleu room transformed into a riot of colour and sound when the Manipuri Dance Group from India took over the stage.

More than 120 people from the various organizations of the PCB enjoyed the spectacle of dance and music, which showcased six traditional Indian dances from the country’s northeastern Manipur region. Afterwards, everyone enjoyed some Indian food provided by the restaurant Zeeshan.

On Friday the IBEC-managed Spanish Nanotechnology Platform, NanoMed Spain, co-hosted the fifth edition of Nano World Cancer Day, a global initiative organized as part of World Cancer Day.

It’s the third year running that the platform has hosted the conference, which took place at the PCB and was opened by IBEC/NanoMed Spain’s Josep Samitier, who also gave a presentation about the platform.
The latest innovations in nanomedicine for cancer were presented and discussed in front of an audience of more than 90 researchers, clinicians, students and industry professionals, as well as journalists.

IBEC has added to its physical locations, with two groups moving to a new site at the other end of av. Diagonal.

The Campus Diagonal Besòs of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) is a new environment for innovation and knowledge, located at the point where Barcelona and the town of Sant Adrià de Besòs meet. Barcelona Est Escola d’Enginyeria (EEBE) is currently the main centre residing there.

An IBEC group’s project was granted funding from the Fundación Científica de la Asociación Española Contra el Cáncer in their 2017 Ayudas LAB AECC call.

Nuria Montserrat’s group will work together with researchers from other Barcelona institutes and one of the city’s major hospitals on the project ‘Generation of Isogenic Models of Clear Cell Renal Cell Carcinoma using CRISPR-engineered Kidney Organoids, for the identification of diagnostic biomarkers’. They will receive support over a three-year period from the AECC Scientific Foundation, whose ‘Ayudas LAB’ funds emerging groups to carry out projects in cancer that have obvious translational possibilities.

The project will develop a human model to study clear cell renal cancer, the most common type of kidney cancer. At present, there are no human models for this cancer, nor for the identification of early biomarkers, which would shed light on the molecular mechanisms of how the cancer starts and allow doctors to diagnose it and start treatments earlier.