Institutional news

IBEC and Hospital Clinic have joined forces in 3D bioprinting applied to cancer diagnostics to win funding from Caixaimpulse.

Core Facilities’ Mateu Pla Roca is the fifth IBEC researcher to win funding from the programme, an initiative of Obra Social “la Caixa” with Caixa Capital Risc, which aims to promote technology transfer in science. His project, “3D bioprinted array tissue-like cores: tissue-like controls for cancer diagnostics” (3DBIOcores), will be carried out in collaboration with Antoni Martinez, head of the histopathology service at Hospital Clinic.

The Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) gains a world-renowned neuroscientist and psychologist with the move this week of ICREA professor Paul Verschure and his Synthetic Perceptive, Emotive and Cognitive Systems group (SPECS) from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra to the institute.

A multidisciplinary group founded in 2005, SPECS aims to find a unified theory of mind, brain and body by using synthetic methods, and to apply such a theory to the development of new cognitive technologies. It’s led by ICREA professor and ERC grantee Paul Verschure, who has an MA and PhD in psychology and who has pursued his research in the USA (San Diego Neurosciences Institute and the Salk Institute) and Europe (University of Amsterdam, University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology).

The Board of Trustees of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST), presided over by Andreu Mas-Colell, ​​has approved the incorporation of IBEC as a new member.

IBEC will bring its expertise and excellent research in the confluence between biology and engineering to BIST, an initiative of six of Catalonia’s research centers of excellence – the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG), the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO), the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ), the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2), the Institute of High Energy Physics (IFAE), and the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona (IRB Barcelona) – to increase their levels of collaboration and build a joint scientific project together. BIST’s strength is based on the research capacity of its centers and its potential to promote cutting-edge research projects in multidisciplinary research.

Nanoprobes and Nanoswitches postdoc Miquel Bosch is one of just six Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellows to be invited by the European Commission to participate in the annual ECSITE Conference 2017.

Taking place in Porto this week, the conference is the largest in Europe devoted to communicating science, attracting more than 1000 people. Miquel has been specially selected, along with five other MSCA fellows from all over Europe – out of a total of more than 100,000 – to take part at their stand at the event, where he will explain his research in a visual and attractive way, “Shedding light upon the brain”.

2017 sees the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) celebrate its first ten years of research activity, with this week’s 10th Anniversary Symposium kicking off the celebrations.

It’s been a hair-raisingly fast climb up to the near top of the tree of centres in the Catalan research arena, with IBEC already holding its own alongside bigger and more established organizations for scientific output, number of ERC grants, patents, spin-offs, training programmes, national or EU-level stamps and endorsements, and other important indicators.

IBEC has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the EF Clif, the European Foundation for the Study of Chronic Liver Failure.

The five-year agreement will enable the two organizations to share staff and knowledge, apply for funding together and otherwise collaborate with the goal of improving knowledge of the mechanisms of chronic liver failure and increasing survival rates for patients.

Two undergraduate biomedical engineering students who are doing their practical work at IBEC have been selected to go to Montreal to compete in SNIFFEST, a new international competition promoting practical and original solutions for odour measurement.

The UB-IBEC team, third year students Alba Iruela and Suhyang Park, have built a system based on chemical sensors and a Raspberry Pi in Santiago Marco’s Signal and Information Processing for Sensing Systems group at IBEC, which is also sponsoring half the cost of their trip. The system contains embedded intelligence algorithms which the students have programmed to analyze the signals from the sensors.

On Wednesday a group of 30 delegates from the 23rd World Smart Systems & Micromachine Summit (MMS 2017) paid a visit to IBEC to find out more about the institute’s activities.

MMS 2017, which has been taking place in Barcelona since Monday, has the special topic of “Micro and Nano systems for Smart Cities applications” this year. It attracts 80 representatives from more than 25 countries annually, and was first organized in 1995 by the Micromachine Center in Japan.

Forty undergraduate and master students attended today’s reSearch4Talent at IBEC, the third time we’ve opened our doors to young scholars interested in a career in science.

Held in the Dolors Aleu room of the Barcelona Science Park, the event started with a welcome and presentation about the institute from IBEC’s director, Josep Samitier, followed by specific information about applications and admissions from Ciara Boter of the HR department.

After the Careers Fair at midday, which was a chance for participants to mingle and chat with IBEC’s researchers, the visitors enjoyed some tours of selected labs.

Last week IBEC attended the 3rd general assembly of the Health Tech Cluster, an alliance of industry, research centres and other bodies working in the health technologies sector in Catalonia.

Established in 2015 with the support of the Catalan government, the HT Cluster counts IBEC and most of hospitals, as the Hospital Clinic among its research and clinical partners. They’re joined by businesses such as Avinent, Vecmedical and Sibel to contribute to the Cluster’s aim of promoting and developing innovative solutions via public-private partnerships to improve the quality of life for patients.