IBEC Archives - Page 11 of 11 - Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia

July 7, 2016July 7, 2016

IBEC a winner at the 10th National Alares Awards 2016

At a ceremony held yesterday at the Caixa Forum in Madrid, IBEC’s managing director David Badia received on behalf of IBEC the second prize for “Reconciliation of Working Life, Family and Personal and Social Responsibility” from the Alares Foundation.

IBEC, which was one of just 39 winners selected from 392 candidates, received the award for the practices implemented in its guide “Measures to reconcile work and family life”, as well as for its actions towards social responsibility. These include the creation of the Human Resources Strategy for Researchers (HRS4R) and its Action Plan, which has 17 measures benefiting staff and researchers; its actions on responsible research and innovation; the training of experts in health technologies; and its extensive programme of dissemination and outreach actions to boost the visibility of the scientific research at the institute, among other things.

July 4, 2016July 1, 2016

New BIB website boosts visibility of Catalan potential in bioinformatics

Bioinformatics Barcelona (BIB) has officially launched its website, which details the bioinformatic activities of 40 partners – including IBEC – and over 80 research groups.

IBEC’s Biomedical Signal Processing and Interpretation, Mechanics of development and disease and Signal and Information Processing for Sensing Systems groups are featured on the site, as they carry out bioinformatics-related activities such as algorithmics, biomedical informatics, biostatistics, or bioinformatics of disease and treatment.

July 4, 2016July 1, 2016

“Continguts divulgatius de l’IBEC”

RECERCAT, the research-related newsletter produced by the Generalitat, features an article about IBEC’s outreach activities in its latest edition.

June 23, 2016

Mycobacterium in olive oil for cancer treatment

Researchers at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) and Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) have revealed a way to effectively deliver a mycobacterium needed for the treatment of bladder cancer in humans –using a formulation based on olive oil.

The researchers have found a way to reduce the natural clumping that occurs when mycobacteria cells, which possess a high content of lipids in their walls, are introduced to the usual aqueous solutions that are used for intravesical instillation in bladder cancer patients. This clumping may interfere with the interaction of the mycobacteria-host cells and negatively influence their antitumor effects.

June 10, 2016June 3, 2016

Reaching new depths: a non-invasive solution for the activation of proteins in deep tissues

Researchers at IBEC and their collaborators at the Centre of Regenerative Medicine of Barcelona (CMR[B]) have developed a revolutionary new technique based on photoactivation (light activation), by which cells in deep tissue can activated and tracked in vivo without causing any damage.

Manipulating protein expression to monitor cell behavior is a powerful tool in the field of biology.

May 23, 2016May 17, 2016

Looking to the ocean for malaria solutions

Researchers have found heparin-like molecules with reduced blood-thinning activity that can be used for therapeutic approaches against malaria – in sea cucumbers, red algae and marine sponges.

Until now, heparin – which has been shown to have antimalarial activity and specific binding affinity for red blood cells infected with the Plasmodium malaria parasite – has not been explored for anti-malarial drug solutions due to its powerful anticoagulating activity. While heparin is able to block the cell adhesion of infected red blood cells to various host receptors and disrupt the growth of the pathogen, its downfall is that the quantities needed for malaria treatment would result in too much blood-thinning and bleeding. There’s also the potential risk of infection, since polysaccharides such as heparin tend to be obtained from mammals.