Yesterday, Wednesday 9th March, the Barcelona Science Park organized the awards ceremony of the best research works of the BATX2LAB program –a project fostered as part of its program ‘Research in Society‘–, which this year has been organized with the support of the Municipal Institute of Education of the Barcelona City Council (IMEB). The event took place at the Dolors Aleu Hall at PCB bringing together more than 100 attendees.
Sequentia Biotech, a company based at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB), has developed the first database of non-coding RNAs in vegetal species: GreeNC. It is a repository of more than 200,000 lncRNAs annotated in 37 plant species and 6 algae that provides information about the sequence, genomic coordinates, coding potential, and folding energy for all lncRNAs identified.
Jordi Naval takes over the management of Fundació Bosch i Gimpera (FBG) with a clear objective: building a climate of trust and interaction among researchers, investors and the productive fabric. A very ambitious challenge that Naval faces with the skill and resolution that his double ‘expertise’ as both, a scientist and entrepreneur, has given him.
On Saturday, the 24 students chosen from more than 200 applicants for the ‘Crazy about Biomedicine course‘ at IRB Barcelona will have their first theory class in the centre, with the collaboration of the Barcelona Science Park (PCB). In fact, the success of first course in this field of science in 2013, an initiative of IRB Barcelona, led the Catalunya–La Pedrera Foundation to increase the number of disciplines on offer and to set up new courses, all of which fall under the umbrella of the ‘Crazy about Science Programme‘.
A study published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications –led by the Centro Nacional de Analisis Genómico (CNAG-CRG), located at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB), and the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ)– revealed a high degree of heterogeneity in how cancer genome sequencing is done at different institutions across the globe. The results of this work –carried out within the framework of the International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC)– lay the foundation for the coming era of cancer genomics by creating guidelines and providing new tools for achieving higher quality data, for better diagnosis and precision medicine.
.
On 16 and 17 November Santiago de Xile hosted the last edition of the largest biotechnology partnering conference in Latin-America, Biolatam 2015.The event, produced by EBD Group and ASEBIO in collaboration with ProChile and Chile Biotech, was attended by over 340 life science dealmakers from pharma, biotech and service companies representing US, Latin American and European entities.organized by the Spanish Association of Biocompanies (Asebio), EBD Group and Chilean biotechnology companies (Asembio), with the support of ProChile and the Chilebiotech cluster. Leitat, its Biomed Division – which has located its Biomedical Division at PCB– is one of the 30 companies from the Spanish state that took part in this global partnering forum which ranks high in a relevant place in biotechnology summits worlwide.
The Molecular Modelling and Bioinformatics Laboratory at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), headed by Modesto Orozco, has published today in Nature Methods a new model which allows atomic-level simulations of DNA dynamics, with unprecedented accuracy. All the simulations and posterior analyses are kept in the first online tool developed to date dedicated to atomic level simulations of nucleic acids. The platform is free of charge and available to the entire scientific community through the Spanish Institute of Bioinformatics and the European network ELIXIR-Excellerate.
In just 43 days, bioinformatics company Mind the Byte, which specializes in products and services for computational drug design and is located in the Barcelona Scientific Park (PCB), has concluded an investment round totalling €234,310 through the crowdequity platform (for investment crowdfunding) Crowdcube. This figure represents not only more than double the funding target set by the company (234%), but it is also the largest round of crowdequity achieved in the biotech industry in Spain, with 115 private investors. The average investment amount was €2,037, with a maximum investment of €80,000.
Protein NBS1, which plays a key role in DNA damage repair, is required for macrophage functional activity. This is one of the conclusions of a scientific paper published in the journal Blood—considered one of the best scientific publications in the field of haematology— and signed by a team of experts from the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona (UB), Consolidated Research Group Macrophage Biology –located at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB)– and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona). The protein also has implications for understanding the immune defects observed in patients with Nijmegen breakage syndrome and other related disorders.
