On the theme of Bioengineering for Regenerative Therapies, the symposium will welcome speakers Josep Samitier and Nuria Montserrat from IBEC; Michael Schneider, Imperial College London; Manuel Salmerón-Sánchez, University of Glasgow; Giorgio Scita, University of Milan; and Ronald McKay, Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Baltimore. The programme will also feature flash presentations by selected poster contributors. This year the symposium is kindly supported by Izasa Scientific, BioLab, Merck Millipore and Fisher Scientific, and will include an information session by Izasa.
On Thursday 1st October, Secretary of State Carmen Vela will be visiting IBEC and taking a tour of the laboratories, before joining staff and scientists at the IBEC-organised B·Debate on “Future Tools for Biomedical Research: in vitro, in silico and in vivo Disease Modeling” at CosmoCaixa. This two-day Centre for International Scientific Debate event, an initiative of Biocat and Obra Social “la Caixa”, will look at new tools and approaches for basic research and preclinical trials of new drugs, finding new solutions to replace the traditional way of evaluating drug safety – such as the use of animals – and look at how nanotechnology and bioinformatics are enabling the custom design of tailored treatments for individual patients and disease profiles.
Speakers at the B·Debate will include IBEC director Josep Samitier; Elisabet Berggren of the European Union Reference Laboratory for Alternatives to Animal Testing (EURL-ECVAM); Steve Brown, head of the Mammalian Genetics Unit at MRC Harwell; Roger Kamm, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering at MIT, who is also a member of IBEC’s SAB, and James Kirkpatrick, Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz.
