Institutional news

The Barcelona Science Park (PCB), where IBEC is located, has just launched a new multimedia platform to publicize the activities of the 75 companies and three research institutes working there.

A new spin-off company created by IBEC and the UPC will focus on the manufacture and marketing of surgical systems.

Rob Surgical Systems Inc., a technology company driven by IBEC group leader Alicia Casals and senior researcher Manuel Frigola, as well as Josep Amat of the Automatic Control and Computer Engineering Department of the UPC, was approved by the university’s governing council on Friday.

Two IBEC-led tissue regeneration projects have been selected for funding by the EU’s ERA-NET EuroNanoMed initiative.

An arts and science initiative involving IBEC and Barcelona’s Arts Santa Mònica centre, which took place earlier this year, has been awarded the Antoni Caparros Prize for Best Knowledge Transfer from the University of Barcelona.

The 55 researchers who received funding from fundraising programme La Marató de TV3 2010, including IBEC’s Pau Gorostiza, attended a ceremony at the UAB last Wednesday where the grants were awarded in the presence of Minister of Health Boi Ruiz, Rector of the UAB Ana Ripoll, and La Marató de TV3 founder Enrique Marin.

The Spanish Ministry of Education has published the list of doctoral programmes that have received the accreditation of “Mention of Excellence”. Among them were all the main doctoral programmes open to IBEC PhD students from the University of Barcelona (UB) and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech (UPC).

Last week’s fourth annual IBEC symposium on Bioengineering and Nanomedicine at the Hospital de Bellvitge attracted a record number of attendees, with more than a third coming from outside the institute. Experts in the various fields of IBEC’s research areas gathered to network and listen to the top-class speakers from Europe and beyond at the event on 18-19 October.

This Thursday, a conference entitled Avenços en recerca i tractament de patologia cardíaca i vascular (Advances in research and treatment of cardiac and vascular disease) organised by the Organització Catalana de Trasplantaments (OCATT) will take place in Barcelona.

The IBEC-coordinated Connect-EU Nanobio + Nanomed working group has published a ‘roadmap’ for nanobiotechnology capabilities in Catalonia, the first major step since the group’s launch at the end of last year.

This month, Barcelona’s Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) will play host to a former astronaut who was also the first member of his profession to stand on top of Mount Everest.