Institutional news

A University of Barcelona master programme in which IBEC participates has been awarded the EIT Label, a certificate of quality for master and doctoral programmes, from EIT Health.

The Master of Technological Innovation in Health (MTIH), led by Sorbonne University, has achieved the EIT Label for its excellent scientific education coupled with innovation and entrepreneurship training. IBEC’s role in the degree programme includes the active participation of students, as well as the innovative technology for health being developed by IBEC’s researchers, many of whom teach on the programme.

Implemented by a consortium of five universities in France, Spain and Portugal, the MTIH provides ‘active learning’ methods and supports student mobility, and new teaching content is being added to strengthen students’ innovation and entrepreneurship expertise.

Eight IBECers were in the Netherlands on 13th and 14th September for the first ever IBEC-ICMS Symposium, ‘NanoSens&Med’.

The event aimed to identify synergies and potential for collaboration between IBEC groups and the researchers of the Institute for Complex Molecular Systems (ICMS), a research institute of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e).

Two IBEC group leaders, Vito Conte and Lorenzo Albertazzi, already have dual appointments with ICMS. They opened the symposium by welcoming all participants from the two institutions and presented their research, as did Eduard Torrents, Elena Martinez, Silvia Muro, Nuria Montserrat, Samuel Sanchez and director Josep Samitier, who also introduced IBEC.

Today IBEC welcomed the new Director General of Research, Development, and Innovation of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (MINECO) to meet some of the group leaders and hear about their research.

Dr. Teresa Riesgo Alcaide met IBEC’s directors and was taken on a tour of the laboratories of Samuel Sánchez, Josep Samitier, Xavier Trepat and Elena Martínez, as well as viewing IBEC’s 3D bioprinting facilities.

Dr. Riesgo was in town for the EIT Health Partner Assembly at Caixa Forum, an important event on the calendar for the network.

IBEC is celebrating its sixth Caixaimpulse success, with Eduard Torrents’ project ‘BiofilmChip: personalized treatment for biofilm infections’ winning support in the programme’s fourth round.

Working in collaboration with Josep Samitier’s Nanobioengineering group, BiofilmChip will develop an easy-to-use device that allows biofilm-forming bacteria to be grown in vitro, enabling clinicians to evaluate the efficency of various antibiotics and determine the best individualized treatment for biofilm-infected patients. 20 projects from all over Spain and Portugal were awarded in this fourth round, selected from a total of 85 submissions.

The European Commission has published its proposal for the next framework programme in research and innovation, Horizon Europe.

Succeeding Horizon 2020, Horizon Europe will run from 2021 to 2027 and aims to strengthen science and technology in the EU to help tackle the major global challenges of our time. The framework programme is based on the conviction that Europe’s success increasingly depends on its ability to transform excellent scientific results into innovation that will have a beneficial impact on the economy and quality of life, and create new markets with more skilled jobs.

IBEC is listed as an ‘outstanding’ Spanish research centre for Horizon 2020 funding in a recent report published by the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI).

The institute, which coordinates eight H2020 projects and is a partner in two more, appears in the table ‘20 asociaciones de investigación más destacadas por retorno en H2020’ (pictured) in the CDTI’s ‘Participación española en Horizonte 2020: Resultados provisionales (2014-2017)’. This report presents the facts and figures behind the participation of Spanish universities, research centres, companies and other organisations in the EU’s current framework programme, which took over from FP7 in 2014.

This week IBEC group leader Elena Martinez is in Toulouse for the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF), the largest interdisciplinary science meeting in Europe, where she is taking part as a speaker.

Elena, who heads IBEC’s Biomimetic systems for cell engineering group, was invited to take part in the ‘Growing mini-organs on a petri dish: myth or reality’ session by the ERC, which funds her COMIET project with a Consolidator grant. COMIET aims to engineer epithelial tissue models that mimic the physiological characteristics found in the human intestine. Around 40 of the ERC’s grantees have been invited to take part in the funding body’s sessions at ESOF this year.

An IBEC project has won funding from the BBVA Foundation under its ‘Ayudas a Equipos de Investigación en Biomedicina’ funding programme.

ICREA research professor Samuel Sánchez’s Smart Nano-Bio-Devices group will receive the support for three years to develop their project ‘MEDIROBOTS: Precision nanobotomy against tumors’.

The project will develop biocompatible robots driven by enzymes with applications as drug release systems whose progress in vitro and in vivo can be traced using advanced molecular imaging techniques such as super-resolution microscopy.