Institutional news Archives - Page 42 of 71 - Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia

October 20, 2016October 20, 2016

IBEC’s first EMBO Young Investigator

IBEC junior group leader and UB assistant professor Pere Roca-Cusachs has been accepted into the prestigious EMBO Young Investigator Programme.

EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organization, chooses some of the best young group leaders in Europe through a highly competitive annual selection. Pere presented his research plan for the next five years to an international panel in Heidelberg at the beginning of October.

“I’m really delighted to have been accepted,” says Pere, who is the first ever IBEC researcher to be selected for the programme, and the only one from Spain this year.

October 18, 2016

IBEC researcher wins international electrochemistry prize

Senior researcher Ismael Diez has won an award from the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE).

The Nanoprobes and Nanoswitches group member is this year’s recipient of the Jaroslav Heyrovsky Prize for Molecular Electrochemistry, which is named after the Czech chemist, inventor and 1959 Nobel Prize winner.

“I’m really happy to have my work recognised by this award, because although I’ve won prizes from the ISE before, this one is for my independent contributions as a senior scientist,” says Ismael, who’s also an assistant professor at the University of Barcelona.

October 10, 2016

International prize for Pere as an emerging leader in science

IBEC junior group leader and UB assistant professor Pere Roca-Cusachs is one of ten finalists selected for the American Society for Cell Biology’s Gibco Emerging Leader Prize.

Supported by Thermo Fisher, the international prize recognises emerging leaders in science who are non-tenured faculty holding independent positions in the early phase of their career. Pere has been chosen as a finalist for his research uncovering the biophysical molecular mechanism by which cells sense tissue rigidity and transduce it into downstream signaling.

September 6, 2023October 4, 2016

ERC funding for new diabetes approach at IBEC

IBEC’s Dr. Javier Ramón is one of just six researchers in Catalonia to have been awarded a 2016 Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC).

The senior researcher in the Biomimetic Systems for Cell Engineering group won funding for his project ‘Diabetes Approach by Multi-Organ-on-a-Chip’ (DAMOC) from Europe’s most prestigious funding body.

With the support, which will last for up to five years, Javier will start a new line to design a innovative new tool to test drugs for diabetes. As well as improving drug testing approaches, the multi-organ-on-a-chip device will provide new therapies to prevent the loss of beta cell mass and defects in the glucose uptake in skeletal muscle associated with type 2 diabetes.

“This project will give me the opportunity to have a multidisciplinary group of researchers working together from the beginning in a synchronized way, the most rewarding experience that a researcher can have,” he says.

September 30, 2016

Strengthening links with Singapore

This week IBEC director Josep Samitier, group leaders Elisabeth Engel, Xavier Trepat and Pere Roca-Cusachs, and Ester Sánchez, representing the Strategic Initiatives Unit, are in Singapore to take part in the first IBEC-MBI Joint Symposium, which took place on 26th September.

The event, hosted by the Mechanobiology Institute (MBI), the National University of Singapore’s dedicated centre focused on exploring this emerging field at the interface of cell biology, physics, engineering and computational biology, aimed to foster collaboration between the two institutions.

The programme included sessions on specific fields of research shared by the two centers, namely cell-matrix interactions, regenerative medicine, matrix to nucleus transduction, collective cell migration, and featured speakers from both sides.

August 16, 2017September 28, 2016

New strategies to combat malaria: heparin and nanomedicine

The Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) and the biotech firm Bioiberica have signed a partnership agreement to study the development of new compounds derived from heparin to combat malaria.

The partnership, which was officially announced this morning at the BioSpain meeting in Bilbao, is based on the research undertaken by Dr Xavier Fernández-Busquets, head of IBEC and ISGlobal’s joint Nanomalaria unit, engaged in developing specific antimalaria therapies, and the R&D project of Bioiberica, world leader in heparin production, to seek new applications of this molecule.

Every year malaria infects 200 million people worldwide and causes half a million deaths. For several decades it has been known that when the malaria parasite enters the bloodstream, it invades the liver cells to produce thousands of merozoites – a stage in the life cycle of the parasite – that enter into the circulation and infect red blood cells, managing to evade the immune system.

September 20, 2016September 20, 2016

IBEC’s participation at B·Debate

Xavier Rubies, head of IBEC’s Technology Transfer unit, took part in last week’s B · Debate conference on “Fighting Blindness. Future Opportunities and Challenges for Visual Restoration”, organized by the Barcelona Macula Foundation in collaboration with the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and LEITAT.

Xavier took part in the “From Bench to Bedside” round table, where he explained the process of bringing research results to market. The other speakers agreed with his position that in order to achieve effective results, it’s necessary to start by looking at demand, and then to lead the transfer of projects according to the needs of the market.

This B · Debate conference, an initiative of Biocat and Obra Social “la Caixa”, aimed to explore the potential of new therapeutic approaches for retinal dystrophies, combining nanotechnology, regenerative medicine, stem cells, gene therapy, genomics, bioengineering, photonics and optogenetics.

August 16, 2017September 14, 2016

Ferrer, IBEC and Mind the Byte join forces to study new molecules against cancer metastasis

The study will take as a starting point the pioneering research conducted by IBEC’s Xavier Trepat on how cadherins interact in metastasis

The pharmaceutical company Ferrer has created a consortium with the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the bioinformatics company Mind the Byte, located at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB), to study the development of new therapeutic molecules against cancer metastasis.

The work will follow the research on cadherin interaction and its role in cells that cause metastasis conducted by Dr. Xavier Trepat, ICREA professor at IBEC and one of the few scientists to have won three grants from the European Research Council (ERC).

September 9, 2016September 5, 2016

Help make IBEC’s photo a winner!

Lorenzo Albertazzi and ‘Gripin’ the virus have made it into the 2016 AXA Research Fund Photo Contest, a competition that challenges scientists to capture their AXA Research Fund project in a single image.

Lorenzo’s photo (left) – taken at IBEC with the help of the Communcications Team – shows him grappling with the ‘virus’, which have the ability to mutate, change, and become resistant to treatments.

With AXA funding, his research group at IBEC is creating resistance-free therapies based on nanofibers that can wrap around a virus like yarn, stopping disease from spreading. “I’d like viruses to be as big as the one in the photo,” says Lorenzo. “It would make our job a lot easier!”

The photo, along with 13 other semi-finalists, has been posted to a dedicated Facebook gallery at which the public can vote during September by “Liking” a photo.

September 2, 2016

Wikipedia entries for IBEC

IBEC now has Wikipedia entries in English, Spanish and Catalan.

Wikipedia is the seventh most-visited website in the world and the largest encyclopedia ever, with 5,200,000 entries in English alone. The fifteen year-old website has been described as the ‘largest collaborative effort in the history of mankind’.

As with all Wikipedia entries, the IBEC page is a ‘living’ page, and will be expanded and improved over time as the institute’s history progresses.

With these new entries, IBEC joins the category “Research institutes in Catalonia” of the free online encyclopedia, in which other centres in the Catalan research system are already present.