Category Archives: SEBiot

After a four years break due to the pandemic, the European Federation of Biotechnology (EFB), of which SEBiot has been Regional Office since 2003, is reconvening its biennial congress, to be held at the De Doelen International Congress Center in Rotterdam (The Netherlands), from 30 June to 3 July 2024.

The European Congress of Biotechnology #ECB2024 will have the overarching theme Grand Challenges of biotechnology: Health, Food Security and Global Warming, which can only be met through the collaboration of research institutions, industry and governments. Therefore, the scientific programme of the meeting will focus on how to translate frontier research into commercially viable applications.

The Congress programme includes plenary sessions, symposia, workshops and panel discussions, as well as a trade exhibition and networking opportunities. Already confirmed as plenary speakers are Sang Yup Lee, Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Vice President of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST), Chris Bowler, Principal Investigator of the Plant and Algal Genomics Group at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, and John van der Oost, PI of the Bacterial Genetics Group at the Microbiology Laboratory of Wageningen University & Research (The Netherlands) and CRISPR expert.

The Rotterdam event in 2024 will be the 19th edition of the ECB and will be held in conjunction with the 19th International Biotechnology Symposium of IUPAC (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry) and the Annual Conference of the Nederlandse Biotechnologie Vereniging (NBV), the Dutch biotechnology association. All three events were due to take place in 2020 and were postponed, reconvened and postponed again in 2021 and 2022, so access will be guaranteed, at no additional cost, for those who registered for the cancelled editions.

Registration and abstract submission for oral and poster presentations is now open. The deadline for abstract submission is 12 April 2024.

The #ECB2024 offers a reduced early bird rate for registrations made before 24 May 2024.

María José Hernaiz, president of SEBiot, and Professor Francesc Godia, from UAB, member of our society and vice-president of the EFB, are part of the Scientific Committee of the event.

Sabine L Flitsch, Lluís Montoliu, Marisol Soengas and Víctor de Lorenzo will be the speakers at the four plenary conferences of the program of the XVIII SEBiot congress, Biotec 2023, to be held from July 17 to 20 at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM).

On the evening of 17 July (19:00 h), after the official opening of the conference, Sabine L. Flitsch, professor and researcher in the field of Chemical Biology at the University of Manchester, will give the first plenary lecture entitled Design and implementation of de novo biocatalytic cascades, in which she will talk about the most recent developments of her research group in the field of biocatalysis.

On Tuesday 18 July (12:30 pm) it will be the turn of Professor Víctor de Lorenzo, director of the Environmental Synthetic Biology Laboratory at the National Biotechnology Centre (CNB-CSIC), who will give the lecture Design meets evolution: Theory and practice. In his talk he will present his work in the field of synthetic biology to respond to environmental sustainability challenges, especially in the field of industrial activity. The session is sponsored by Darwin Bioprospecting Excellence.

Marisol Soengas, leader of the CNIO Melanoma Research Group and vice-president of the Spanish Association for Cancer Research (ASEICA), will talk about her research in the field of identifying biomarkers for cancer prognosis, diagnosis and treatment in her lecture Imaging and targeting premetastatic niches in melanoma on Wednesday 19 July (12:30 h).

The fourth plenary conference will take place on Thursday 20 July (12:00 h) and will be given by Professor Lluís Montoliu, researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones Biomédicas en Red en Enfermedades Raras (CIBERER-Carlos III Health Institute) and the Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia (CNB-CSIC), who will talk about Biotechnological Applications of CRISPR Tools and review the latest advances in the applications of this gene-editing technique.

The conference programme also includes three round tables on job opportunities for young biotechnologists (18 July, 17:00 h), the situation of university biotechnology studies in Spain (19 July, 15:30 h), and entrepreneurship and biotech companies in Spain and Europe (20 July, 11:00 h), as well as several tracks on food, environmental, industrial, plant and microbial biotechnology, biotechnology and health and biocatalysis, where the selected oral communications will be available. There will also be poster sessions on 18 and 19 July (14:30 h – 15:30 h).

For those interested in presenting abstracts at the congress, the deadline for oral communications is 30 May and for posters it is 15 June. Instructions and thematic areas for the presentation of abstracts are detailed on the conference website.

Gibberellins are phytohormones that play important roles in different aspects of plant development, such as germination or flowering, but also in plant adaptation to adverse environmental conditions. Researchers from the Spanish Centre for Biotechnology and Plant Genomics (CBGP) have shown that HOP co-chaperones participate in the signaling of gibberellins in plants.

The study, carried out in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana, has shown that HOP co-chaperones (HSP70-HSP90 organising proteins) play an essential role in gibberellin signalling, binding to the F-box protein SNE and facilitating its accumulation and stabilisation. In this way, HOP proteins facilitate the degradation of the DELLA RGA protein, accelerating key physiological processes that depend on the gibberellin pathway, such as germination, flowering or plant adaptation to moderate increases in temperature. These studies are key to understanding how plants adapt to temperature increases associated with climate change.

The article has been published in Plant Communications (2023).

More information at CBGP website.

The CPV of the Future project has evaluated the use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a complement to advanced statistics and multivariate analysis to monitor ongoing bioprocesses. Professor Francisco Valero, leader of the Bioprocess Engineering and Applied Biocatalysis group (ENG4BIO) of the UAB Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering, and Toni Manzano, from the company Aizon, specialized in the application of AI solutions in the pharmaceutical industry, summarize the main conclusions of the study.

CPV is the third stage of Process Validation, which is a requirement in the pharmaceutical industry during drug manufacturing. Since Stage 3 is typically a long manufacturing phase, extensive data is accumulated, trended, and analyzed during this stage. Thus, CPV highly recommends process automation, Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) and a deep knowledge of the manufacturing process and drug product in order to interact with the process, avoiding deviations and ensuring the expected product performance and product quality. Continuous variability is part of the reality around manufacturing biological operations and the established conditions (EC), critical quality attributes (CQA), and critical process parameters (CPP) are not enough to describe a real and complete picture of the bioprocess. Statistics and Multivariate Analysis can be complemented with artificial intelligence (AI) to evaluate the on-going process. Under this context, artificial intelligence allows predicting, classifying, recognizing and recommending improvements to the process, which leads to enhanced product quality.

The CPV of the Future project was designed to obtain deep knowledge of the production of recombinant proteins under hypoxic conditions in the cell factory Komogataella phaffii, The applied methodology, the results and conclusions should be generalized across any biomanufacturing operation. Therefore, the identified AI opportunities to mitigate challenges introduced by uncertainty or to augment a continuous multivariate control in real time, provides an added value to the current Statistical Process Control. A set of fed-batches were produced to generate the raw data used to train AI Models which finally controlled the fed-batch process by giving real time feedback to the bioreactor based on the on-going acquired during the process, maintaining the respiratory quotient (RQ) on the set point acting on agitation rate (see figure). The first results obtained has been very promising considering the inherent variability of biological bioprocesses.

The Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) coordinated the CPV of the Future project and the PQRI (USA) and the Science and Innovation Ministry (Spain) partially funded the project. The project was designed to establish a standard procedure for continued process verification (CPV) in bioprocesses applying Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud technologies as valid mechanisms for the process control in drug manufacturing, The production of recombinant proteins under hypoxic conditions in the cell factory K. phaffii was selected as case study. The group of Bioprocess Engineering and Applied Biocatalisis (ENG4BIO) of the Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering of the UAB participates in the project providing the biotech SME, the set of experiments and the lab equipment for batch and fed-batch production. Infors and Bluesense provided the software EVE and the O₂ and CO₂ gas analyzers sensors connected to the bioreactor and Aizon brought the AI SME, IoT, cloud and AI tools for process control. The rest of the PDA team supported the project from a pharmaceutical perspective.

Francisco.valero@uab.cat
Toni.manzano@aizon.ai

In the Extraordinary Assembly of the Spanish Society of Biotechnology (SEBiot) held yesterday afternoon, the presidency and vice-presidency of the Board of Directors of the entity were renewed, as well as two members of the same. María José Hernáiz Gómez-Degano (UCM), who had held the vice presidency since November 2021, is the new president of SEBiot, replacing Fernando Peláez, who is leaving the Board of Directors after four years in the presidency, although he will continue to collaborate in activities , such as the preparation of the Biotec 2023 congress.

María Auxiliadora Prieto, head of the Polymer Biotechnology Laboratory at the CIB-CSIC, joins the Board as the new vice president of the entity. Two positions of Board members have also been renewed. Leaving the Board of Directors are Ion Arocena, general director of AseBio —patron member of SEBiot— and Federico Morán, head of the UCM Biophysics Laboratory. They are replaced by Enrique Samper, founder and CEO of the biotechnological company NIMGenetics, and Fátima Al-Shahrour, who leads the Translational Bioinformatics Unit at the CNIO.

Likewise, María Asunción Longo González, a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Vigo, joins the Board of Directors as elected secretary, with the aim of collaborating with the current secretary, Francisco Valero, whose functions she will assume within a year, when Professor Valero’s term expires.

Prior to voting on the new positions, the Ordinary General Assembly of Members was held in which, through the report of the presidency, a review of the activities carried out during 2022 was made.

The Biotechnology societies of Mexico, Portugal, Brazil and Spain subscribed an agreement for the promotion and development of Biotechnology in their countries. The agreement, which has been signed within the framework of the Bioiberoamérica 2016 congress in Salamanca, will promote the exchange of experiences and joint activities.

Read the Fiambiot Agreement.