The promotion of cross-border projects between regions of South-West Europe, funded by Interbio through Biocat, has allowed us to establish new research collaborations with researchers from the Instituto de Tecnologia Química e Biológica (ITQB) of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (UNL) and the Laboratoire d’Analyse et d’Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Tolouse.
The assessment of this experience is very positive and we are looking for additional sources of funding in order to increase the scope for collaboration. The funding received from Interbio through Biocat has allowed financing short stays to discuss new ideas, and especially perform some initial experiments to better understand the other institutions. By doing this, we have been able to evaluate the potential of each group and discriminate whether we can carry out complementary projects with them. The resulting collaboration has gone beyond its initial goal and we have initiated a process of proposals for new biomedical microdevices with ITQB of Portugal, with whom it is also being assessed, depending on the results in the coming months, the possibility of apply for a patent jointly.
An interesting aspect of this project between alike countries has been to allow the statement that there is potential for ambitious collaborative projects in areas very close geographically and culturally but sometimes disregarded by ignorance or excessive globalization.
Antoni Homs Corbera
Institut de Bioenginyeria de Catalunya