Institutional news

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IBEC is a member of one of five ‘communities’ that will receive funding as part of the RIS3CAT intiative, which aims to enable and promote large projects in Catalonia that combine industry and research.

In the launch meeting at the headquarters of RIS3CAT coordinator ACCIO – the government’s agency for competitivity in business – on Monday, Minister for Business and Enterprise Jordi Baiget, who chaired the event alongside Director General of Industry Nuria Betriu, declared RIS3CAT “the greatest ever effort for innovation in Catalonia”.

IBEC is a member of NEXTHEALTH, one of two health-related RIS3CAT communities among the five, all of which bring together businesses, research organizations, hospitals, and other major players to form a critical mass to work in collaboration on large-scale projects to boost innovation.