Kick-off meeting of IBISBA 1.0, a European project focused on supporting industrial biotechnology

The IBISBA 1.0 project (Industrial Biotechnology Innovation and Synthetic Biology Accelerator 1.0) was launched on February 21^st, 2018 in Toulouse (France) with a kick-off meeting hosted by Institut National des Sciences Appliquees de Toulouse, participant site of this new project within the EU Horizon 2020 program.

The Centro de Investigaciones Biológicas (CIB) from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) participates in this project which is granted with € 5 million. The work at CIB will be directed by Dr. María Jesús Martínez, Head of the Biotechnology for Lignocellulosic Biomass group, and Dr. José Luis García, Head of the Environmental Biotechnology group, both at the department of Microbial and Plant Biotechnology. The IBISBA project is a collaboration between 11 academic and 5 industrial partners from 9 European countries (France (5), Belgium (1), Germany (3), Finland (1), Spain (2), Italy (1), Greece (1), United Kingdom (1) and The Netherlands (1)).

The IBISBA 1.0 project aims to create a coordinated network of research infrastructure facilities that support industrial biotechnology, a hybrid technology that embraces biocatalyst design and bioprocess development, together with synthetic biology in a field that has provided advances recently for designing new enzymes and cell factories.

The work of the consortium involved in the European project is to open access to first-rate research facilities and lay the foundations for a permanent research infrastructure that will address some of the main challenges that are currently hampering the development of industrial biotechnology, a key enabling technology (KET) of Europe’s bioeconomy.

IBISBA 1.0 project aims to reach out several target groups, such as academia and industries (in particular Small and Medium Enterprises, SMEs), which need more access to research infrastructure offering both scientific excellence and the ability to promote innovation in bioprocess development in a workflow which will cover pathway and strain design and optimization, standard operating procedures for pathway and strain engineering, and product identification and quantification from omics data. The workflows will be an important step to reproducible science and shared know-how and together with high-throughput construction and testing of engineered cells using robotic platforms will allow for stronger productivity.

More information: IBISBA 1.0 Press Release (link to the pdf document)
                              https://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/212584_en.html