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Pere Roca-Cusachs wins City of Barcelona award

Pere Roca-Cusachs, group leader at IBEC and assistant professor at the University of Barcelona, has won the 2017 City of Barcelona Award for the life sciences.

The prize comes after the publication of his study in Cell last year, where he identified a mechanism by which tissue rigidity regulates cell survival and proliferation, as well as its implications in diseases such as cancer and liver and lung fibrosis.

The City of Barcelona Awards are granted by Barcelona City Council, and the jury – Patrick Aloy, Juan Valcárcel, Cristina Subidas, Elena Casacuberta, and Neus Agell – were unanimous in their choice of Pere for the prize.

Joining forces with FEDER to collaborate on solutions for rare diseases

IBEC has signed a collaboration agreement with the Federación Española de Enfermedades Raras (FEDER), a non-profit organization that represents the three million people suffering from rare diseases throughout the country.

Rare diseases are those that affect fewer than 5 out of every 10,000 inhabitants. According to the WHO, there are about 7,000 such diseases affecting 7% of the world’s population, so altogether they affect a huge number of people – and they can appear at any stage of life. The agreement with IBEC will connect the institute with patients’ associations to develop projects together that have a direct application according to the needs of sufferers.

A new site for IBEC

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.

Education award for IBEC’s outreach activities

IBEC has been awarded the “Segell de Qualitat Educativa” (seal of educative quality) by the Consell De Coordinació Pedagògica of Barcelona City Council’s Institute of Education, an educational network that includes 155 institutions and organizations that offer educational activities.

This recognition is of the quality of IBEC’s outreach activities that the institute carries out for school pupils, teachers, the general public, and many other audiences.

IBEC project wins funding from the AECC

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.

IBEC a key player in FET Flagship proposal

IBEC is on the Steering Committee of a Future Emerging Technologies (FET) Flagship proposal, the Personalised Health Care Initiative in Europe.

The large-scale initiative, if granted, will address the grand challenges of developing regenerative, precision and personalized medicine to improve the quality of life of billions of patients worldwide.

Coordinated from the University of Minho in Portugal, Personalised Health Care has a huge partner and supporter base of more than 125 academia and health institutes, 35 research institutes, 85 industry and associations, and 20 authority representatives. IBEC Director Josep Samitier and group leader Elisabeth Engel are among the 17 members of the steering committee, which includes academics and industry leaders from ten European countries, and the only ones from a partner located in Spain.

600 attend Bojos per la Ciència opening ceremony

600 people attended the opening ceremony of “Bojos per la Ciència” (Crazy about Science), the Fundació Catalunya-La Pedrera initiative that aims to encourage scientific vocation, at Món Sant Benet on Friday.

2018 will be the first year that IBEC takes part in the initiative, first launched in 2013, which offers courses to selected high school students who show aptitude in science.

IBEC’s course on bioengineering – which has 25 people enrolled – will introduce students to the multidisciplinary environment offered by the field, where different disciplines come together to solve health problems.

Another IBEC winner nets a Premi PIONER

Maria Valls from IBEC’s Biomimetic systems for cell engineering group has won a PIONER prize from CERCA for her doctoral thesis.

She’s the second ever IBEC winner of one of these prestigious prizes, which since their launch in 2014 have recognised theses with results that are clearly aimed at commercial exploitation.

The jury described her thesis, ‘Development of an advanced 3D culture system for human cardiac tissue engineering’, as having “a high degree of complexity and promising results, which combines different disciplines within the field of bioengineering to create a bioreactor”.

Faster Future 2017 now open for donations

The website of Faster Future, IBEC’s brand new fundraising programme, is now accepting donations.

The initiative, which is being launched this year in time for Giving Tuesday, aims to raise money to help accelerate research projects that are close to tackling major challenges in health.

The money donated via crowdfunding in this first edition will make possible the development of a new solution for muscular dystrophy being developed in Javier Ramon’s Biosensors for Bioengineering group. Their ‘muscle-on-a-chip’ will use a patient’s own cells to study myotonic dystrophy type 1, a progressive disability that begins in adulthood and affects 50,000 people in Spain alone. As well as modelling the patient’s disease in a personalized way, the platform will also allow the study of different drugs or treatments in conditions that mimic the body as closely as possible, as well as offering a more reliable alternative to animal models.

IBEC to launch Faster Future, a new fundraising initiative, on Giving Tuesday

Next week IBEC will launch Faster Future, a new crowdfunding initiative that aims to help accelerate research projects that are close to tackling major challenges in health.

This year, Faster Future will be raising money for a new solution for muscular dystrophy being developed in Javier Ramon’s Biosensors for Bioengineering group. Their ‘muscle-on-a-chip’ will use a patient’s own cells to study myotonic dystrophy type 1, a progressive disability that begins in adulthood and affects 50,000 people in Spain alone.

As well as modelling the patient’s disease in a personalized way, the platform will also allow the study of different drugs or treatments in conditions that mimic the body as closely as possible, as well as offering a more reliable alternative to animal models.