2nd Industrial Expert Workshop held at PharmaMar, Spain

The second-Industrial Expert Workshop, titled “Marine Micr'Omics for Biotech Applications”, was successfully held at the headquarter of the company PharmaMar, on the 30 and 31 of March  2015 in Colmenar Viejo, near Madrid, Spain. It was a joint event of the three projects Micro B3, MaCuMBA and PharmaSea.

A total of 65 participants from industry and academia from seven different European countries met for this two-day workshop. They discussed current approaches on the discovery of new bioactive compounds and how new tools especially in the fields of metagenomics and bioinformatics could support the understanding of complex data for identifying new pharmaceuticals  and for producing new or better enzymes and other small molecules.

     

    

The programme included four sessions with  invited speakers from academia and industry, Also a guided tour of the PharmaMar laboratories was organized during the workshop , where also one of the few marine-derived pharmaceuticals, the anti-cancer drug Yondelis, is produced. Finally, a panel with representative from large and small companies, the Medina Foundation, academics from CSIC and  EU project coordinators discussed the need for training, the role of SMEs and utility of bioinformatics services and tools for predicting and discovering new compounds of interest to the pharmaceutical and industrial biotechnology industries.

For further information please check here