A new business project, Ascidea, that includes members of the CBBL has been awarded as one of the selected projects to be helped being developed during the 1st VALORTEC contest from the Generalitat de Catalunya ACC10 initiative for technology transfer.
More details soon.

From the site itself:

“This newly funded project under the Lifelong Learning Programme, Curriculum Development started in October 2010.

Currently there is no formal VPH-specific training in Europe. Some MSc programmes in related areas partially address this challenge, but none focuses on the essential characteristics of the discipline, such as heterogeneous data fusion, multi-scale and multi-physics modelling of physiopathology, and simulation of complex clinical work-flows. VPH-MIP will address this deficiency by developing a framework for VPH graduate programmes.

In a multi-disciplinary field such as the VPH, it is essential that students have a solid scientific grounding. The curriculum envisaged, will be tailored to VPH needs, but will be founded in relevant, and successful, pre-existing programmes at partner institutions. Novel VPH-specific modules covering core topics will be developed for use in all participating institutions and delivered through intensive use of ICT technologies, facilitating cultural and language adaptations. In addition, mobility between institutions, facilitated by ERASMUS exchange, will be encouraged enabling students to complement training provided by their primary institution by undertaking selected specialist modules at a second institution. In the longer term, joint or double awards are envisaged.”

The MSc on Bioinformatics for Health Sciences is one of the masters chosen to integrate the VPH-MIP initiative.

The CBBL has entered in the testing phase of the new Altix UV 1000 at CESCA. Adun’s performance is being benchmarked. tera110_p6_Desembre2010

I learned from Lorena Pantano about the BioGenIn site, a meeting point for bioinformatics students at several levels. Great initiative, worth taking into account if you are a student in the field in Spain. But I better leave the description to them:

We are a national group working to organize Bioinformatics students in Spain with an aim to foster collaborations between students and also create an active network for spreading information about
developments and opportunities in Bioinformatics
We consist of two groups:

And here is the flier you may feel free to distribute: BioGenIn

Excerpt from the upcoming VPH NoE newsletter

A central training activity in WP4 of the VPH NoE is the organization of a series of study groups (SGs) to disseminate the philosophy, the theory and the practical implementations beyond the VPH initiative. After a first SG in Nottingham in July 2009, Barcelona hosted the second of such events in the outstanding premises of the Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona (PRBB), a centre that includes several institutions devoted to different aspects of biomedical research, including researchers in two of the general members of the VPH NoE: UPF and IMIM-Hospital del Mar. The SG consisted of five days of highly interactive activities. During the first day, the format of a workshop was used to introduce the participants to the main theme of the SG: multiscale simulations in biomedicine. The approach taken this year was to deal with a generic theme, as it paved the way to discuss basic and applied aspects of the research design from different perspectives: concept of a (multiscale) model, mathematical foundation, physical principles, computational details and, finally, problem-based analysis. To exemplify the meaning of the multiscale approach, three use cases were proposed in the areas of 1) mechanobiology and biomechanics of aneurism evolution, 2) lung mechanics, and 3) drug induced ion-channel blocking in cardiomiocytes and its effect in arrhytmogenesis. The workshop included presentations by Peter Kohl (U Oxford), Kevin Burrage (U Oxford and U Queensland), Alfons Hoekstra (U Amsterdam), Gustavo Deco (UPF), Paul Watton (U Oxford), Blanca Rodríguez (U Oxford) and Bertran Maury (U Paris Sud). After this first day, the participants were distributed in several work groups to discuss possible pipelines for the multiscale description of the suggested questions. For three days, the work groups divided their time between internal discussions and attendance to tutorials on several VPH toolkit related topics. These included tutorials on distributed computing in Europe by Stefan Zasada (UCL), standards for model sharing in systems biology by Jonathan Cooper (U Oxford), an introduction to the VPH toolkit by Keith McCormack (U Sheffield) and Yves Martelli (UPF), and the use of the online research network Activ8 by James Dalton and Albert Mascarell (UPF and O2HLink, inc.). On the last day of the SG, each group gave a short presentation of their conclusions in an informal workshop, sharing the final conclusion that the objective of the SG was achieved: coming back home with more open questions and exciting ideas than clear answers.
The workshop was a success in realizing that good research is often based on simple ideas and hypothesis, even though we often work on complex experimental designs. Clearly, ingenuity and curiosity are pre-requisites for creativity. Computer simulations and, in particular, the work of researchers in the VPH community (understood in a sense that outsources the VPH NoE or the VPH initiative themselves), can not only support other research fields in achieving their goals but also, and this is our central motivation, they can generate scientific results as any other technique may do.