Images
ICREA researcher Roger Gomis at IRB receives technology valorisation funding from the Generalitat de Catalunya.
This funding seeks to faciliatate the success of technology transfer to the market.
Today the agency for business competitiveness of the Generalitat de Catalunya, ACCIÓ, has announced the award of more than 90,000 euros of funding for the technology transfer project called “New markers for bone metastases”. Over the next two years, ICREA researcher Roger Gomis at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB), head of the Growth Control and Cancer Metastasis lab, will develop the project.
VALTEC technology valorisation funding is a new line of resources to motivate technology and research centres to conduct projects and activities of technological value and to offer them tools to compete in the market. The projects have to be in a precompetitive stage and the funding allows them to reduce the uncertainties about the commercial viability of the technology in question.
Gomis seeks to identify molecular targets that will allow the future development of a diagnostic test on the capacity of primary tumours to metastasize to the bone. His group studies the way in which growth factors, signalling pathways and gene expression programmes control normal proliferation of cells and the metastasis of cancer cells. The team is identifying the genes that selectively act as mediators in breast cancer metastasis to specific organs such as bones.
At the end of 2010, Gomis set up the spin-off enterprise Inbiomotion, specialized in the development of markers to predict bone metastases on the basis of primary tumour analysis. In 2012, Inbiomotion received a 2-million euro investment form the capital risk company Ysios Capital.
More information: VALTEC funding, Generalitat de Catalunya
About IRB Barcelona
The Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona) pursues a society free of disease. To this end, it conducts multidisciplinary research of excellence to cure cancer and other diseases linked to ageing. It establishes technology transfer agreements with the pharmaceutical industry and major hospitals to bring research results closer to society, and organises a range of science outreach activities to engage the public in an open dialogue. IRB Barcelona is an international centre that hosts 400 researchers and more than 30 nationalities. Recognised as a Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence since 2011, IRB Barcelona is a CERCA centre and member of the Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology (BIST).
