Institutional news

Britain and Catalonia may not agree about everything, especially when it comes to football, but one area in which they demonstrate a united front is nanotechnology. The UK is one of the three leading countries in the world for health-related nanotechnology, while in Catalonia, nanobiomedicine has become a particular research strength, with Barcelona the second city in the world with more scientific publications on the subject after Boston.

18 young researchers from all over Europe have been learning new skills yesterday and today in the lab sessions part of the second “Interrogations at the Biointerface” Advanced Summer School, hosted by IBEC.

This Monday saw IBEC celebrate the milestone of its fifth annual symposium on Bioengineering and Nanomedicine.

Last week saw the start of the three-year European project PLANTOID, of which IBEC’s Nanobioengineering group is a partner, which aims to design and develop robots inspired by plants.

Coordinated by the Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR) of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, the project “Innovative Robotic Artefacts Inspired by Plant Roots for Soil Monitoring (PLANTOID)”, which is funded within the European Commission’s prestigious Future and Emerging Technologies Open (FET-Open) scheme, aims to create robots called Plantoids which, combining a new generation of hardware and software technologies, will be able to imitate the behaviour of plant roots.

Last week IBEC signed two collaboration agreements with the Institut d’Investigació en Ciències de la Salut Germans Trias i Pujol (IGTP) to carry out and promote scientific and translational research.

The latest edition of InsideIBEC, the newsletter of IBEC, is available now.

This morning IBEC signed a collaboration agreement with the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) in Barcelona.

IBEC’s Annual Report 2011 (English edition) is now available, and a new section for this year is ‘scientific highlights’.

IBEC Senior Researcher Eduard Torrents participated in a conference to mark the  National Day for Cystic Fibrosis last Wednesday 25 April.  This event, which took place at the Spanish Society of Pneumology and Thoracic Surgery (SEPAR), also included the official presentation of funds from the Associació Catalana de Fibrosis Quística (Catalan Association of Cystic Fibrosis) to research groups specializing in the disease.

IBEC associate director Josep Samitier officially opened the Tecnorrevolución exhibition at Barcelona’s CosmoCaixa museum last night.