Research news

We’ve all eaten rich meals or fatty foods and joked that we can feel our ‘arteries hardening’. However, the reality of atherosclerosis – when fat, cholesterol, and other substances build up in the artery walls and form solid structures called plaques – is no joking matter. The consequences of this disorder can include stroke and coronary artery disease, the leading cause of death in many developed countries.

Now, a new scientific project involving IBEC and three other European research centres is set to offer a novel, minimally-invasive treatment for atherosclerosis patients, thanks to funding awarded by the European Commission.

Much like a kindergarten full of unruly toddlers, the cells that contribute to the body’s crucial processes can’t always be trusted to do what you want or expect them to do. Now IBEC researchers have made an important breakthrough that could contribute to the development of therapies for spinal and neural diseases:  they’ve figured out exactly what it is that makes certain cells misbehave in particular circumstances.

Scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) describe a major step towards the understanding of epilepsy in a paper published in Molecular Biology of the Cell.

In the study, the researchers shed new light on the importance of a neuronal protein known as PrPc, which performs a number of physiological functions in many neural processes. When mutated or misfolded, the pathogenic form of the protein, PrPsc, induces progressive conditions that affect the brain and nervous system, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and BSE, while in epilepsy it appears that the healthy protein plays a preventative role.

First measurements of forces driving collective cell migration unveil new principle in biology

Processes like tissue regeneration and cancer metastasis rely on groups of cells moving long distances without losing their cohesiveness, but how they do this has remained unknown. Now researchers from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and Harvard University have solved the mystery and unveiled a brand new phenomenon in biology.

People can be brittle, transparent, shattered, or have a heart of glass. Now these attributes seem all the more appropriate following a discovery by researchers that migrating cells in our bodies behave in a remarkably similar way to glass when it is heated and cooled.

In a study published in PNAS, researcher Xavier Trepat from Barcelona’s Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and his collaborators have been looking at collective cell migration, which occurs in our tissue for good or bad: during embryonic development or wound healing, for example, but on the other hand in cancer invasion.