Category Archives: Congress

The programme for the XIX Spanish Biotechnology Society Congress – Biotec 2025 is becoming more and more detailed and we already know the names of the four speakers who will be leading the plenary sessions of the event, which will be held at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) between 15 and 18 July.

The plenary lecture on the opening day of the congress, Tuesday 15 July (19h), will feature Dr Michael Koepcke, Chief Innovation Officer of the company LanzaTech, which specialises in the capture and conversion of CO2 into compounds of industrial interest through biotechnological processes. Dr. Koepke is a pioneer and leader in synthetic biology, with more than 15 years of experience in biotechnology, and has received awards such as the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge for Greener Synthetic Pathways from the US Environmental Protection Agency. He is the inventor of more than 500 patents and has published more than 50 scientific papers, including seminal studies for a first genetic system and model for anaerobic carbon-fixing microbes and for the biofabrication of carbon-negative fuels and chemicals.

The plenary lecture on Wednesday 16 July (12:30h) will be given by Dr Fátima Bosch, professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the UAB and director of the Centre for Animal Biotechnology and Gene Therapy (CBATEG) at the university, which specialises in research into metabolic diseases, with a special focus on obesity and diabetes. Dr Bosch, whose lecture is entitled Gene therapy to treat highly prevalent metabolic diseases: A new horizon for human health, will talk about the potential of gene therapies to treat this type of pathology.

The third plenary lecture, on Thursday 17 July (12:30h), will be given by Dr Amparo Querol, scientific director of the Institute of Agrochemistry and Food Technology (IATA-CSIC), Valencia, and will be entitled Optimisation of wine fermentations through innovative approaches: yeast biodiversity, multiomic analysis and design based on metabolic flux models. Querol, who directed the IATA between 2011 and 2015, has focused her research on yeasts used in the production of wine, beer and cider. As she points out, her interest focuses on understanding the mechanisms involved in the adaptation that has shaped the yeast genome, giving it properties of biotechnological interest. More recently, she has focused her work on strategies to remedy the impact of climate change on the wine sector, combining biotechnology with robotics and ICT. She has several patents on yeasts and microorganisms for wine production, and in 2013 she received the DiVinos research prize, awarded by the Regulatory Council of the DO Utiel Requena, for her contributions to the sector.

The fourth and last plenary lecture will be given on Friday 18 July (12h) by Dr Alfonso Valencia, ICREA researcher and director of the Department of Life Sciences at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS). There he leads a group dedicated to research into the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to personalised medicine, and is an international benchmark in the extraction, integration and exploitation of big data for genomic research. Dr Valencia is also director of the National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB-ISCIII), Spanish node of the European bioinformatics infrastructure ELIXIR, and co-director of the Master in Bioinformatics and Data Science in Personalised Precision Medicine and Health, organised since 2016 by the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, in collaboration with the CNIO, the BSC-CNS, the Roche Institute Foundation and SEBiot. His lecture at Biotec 2025 will be on Biotechnology in the times of AI.

In addition to these keynote presentations, the programme will include, as in previous editions, thematic sessions on food biotechnology, biocatalysis, biotechnology and health, environmental biotechnology, microbial biotechnology, industrial biotechnology, plant biotechnology and new challenges in biotechnology. Each of these sessions will have two keynote speakers, two oral communications and two flash communications, selected from the proposals sent to the Scientific Committee of the congress. There will also be the possibility to present posters.

The period for the submission of oral communication proposals is scheduled to open on 15 February. The congress website will be published shortly with details of the calendar for the presentation and approval of oral communications, the thematic areas and the instructions for submitting abstracts.

The SEBiot Congress is an ideal framework for PhD students to have their baptism of fire in public presentations of their research, while they can learn first-hand about the work of experienced scientists and interact with them in the networking spaces.

Also as in previous editions, on the morning of 15 July, and prior to the opening of the congress, the Course on Omic Technologies and the Course on Biotechnological Processes and Applied Biocatalysis, which have been so successful in previous editions, will be held. ♦

For four days, from 17 to 20 July, the Faculty of Pharmacy of the UCM hosted the XVIII National Biotechnology Congress Biotec 2023, which brought together more than 200 researchers, students and biotechnology professionals to learn about the latest advances in our sector. Within this framework, Juan Mangas, from the Department of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oviedo, received the SEBiot Young Research Talent Award 2023, sponsored by Solmeglas.

Juan Mangas Sánchez obtained his PhD in Chemistry from the University of Oviedo (2013), under the supervision of Vicente Gotor Santamaría and Vicente Gotor-Fernández (Department of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry), working on the design of new enzymatic processes to prepare compounds of pharmacological interest. In his first postdoctoral stage, he worked for two years in the group of Professor Patrick Adlercreutz, at the University of Lund (Sweden), where he studied the optimisation of enzymatic processes to obtain biodiesel and special triglycerides.

In 2015, he joined Professor Nicholas Turner’s group at the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (UK) as a research associate to work on the discovery of new enzymes for the more sustainable preparation of chiral amines, compounds of great importance in the chemical industry. These enzymes are now used to prepare drugs on an industrial scale. As a result of these studies, he received the 2021 Rita and John Cornforth Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry, along with colleagues from the University of York and the companies Prozomix and GSK.

In 2020, Mangas joined the Institute of Chemical Synthesis and Homogeneous Catalysis (ISCQH-CSIC) in Zaragoza as an ARAID researcher to begin his career as an independent scientist. There he started to develop new lines of research combining different types of catalysts to prepare chemical compounds of interest in a more efficient way.

Recently, he joined as a Ramón y Cajal researcher the Department of Organic and Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Oviedo, where he was trained years ago. Juan Mangas has co-authored 40 research articles on the use of enzymatic catalysis in asymmetric chemical synthesis in prestigious international journals and has been awarded the Zaragoza Royal Society of Sciences Chemistry Award 2022 and the Thieme Chemistry Journals Award 2023.

“Receiving the award for young researchers in biotechnology from the SEBiot is something that makes me very excited”, explains Juan Mangas. For the researcher “it is an honour and tremendously gratifying that such a prestigious society as SEBiot recognises my professional career. At the Biotec 2023 congress, organised by the Society this week in Madrid, the high level of biotechnology in Spain was evident, which makes this recognition even more valuable. I am also very grateful to Solmeglas for sponsoring these awards”.

Four intense days

It is impossible to summarise in a few lines the content of a congress that offered almost 70 talks – including plenary lectures, keynotes and oral communications – distributed in seven tracks, four round tables, the presentation of almost 70 posters and several networking activities. On the social media profiles of SEBiot and many of the participants, using the hashtag #Biotec2023, you can see how the congress has been followed.

In this image gallery you can take a look at some of the highlights of Biotec 2023, an event that would not have been possible without the support of all our partners, sponsors and collaborating companies, whom we would like to thank once again for their participation and commitment.

Monday 17 July

Tuesday 18 July

Wednesday 19 July

Thursday 20 July