Barcelona Biomedical Research Park

The Barcelona Biomedical Research Park (PRBB), inaugurated in May 2006, is an initiative of the Government of Catalonia, the [http://www.bcn.cat/english/ihome.htm City Council of Barcelona] and the [http://www.upf.edu/english/web/ Pompeu Fabra University (UPF)] . It is a large scientific infrastructure that is physically connected to the ‘ [http://www.imasbcn.com/hospitals/hospital-del-mar/es_index.html Hospital del Mar de Barcelona] ’ and that gathers together six public research centres closely coordinated amongst them. Each centre is independent and the PRBB Consortium has the responsibility of managing the building and the services, as well as of coordinating the scientific activity common to all the centres. Its critical mass of about 1,100 people make the PRBB one of the largest biomedical research clusters in the south of Europe, in which science and diversity are connected in a unique creative space.

The centres that are part of the PRBB are:

- [http://www.imim.es/imim_esp Municipal Institute of Medical Research (IMIM)]

- [http://www.upf.edu/cexs/cast/ Department of Experimental and Health Sciences of the Pompeu Fabra University (CEXS-UPF)]

- [http://pasteur.crg.es/portal/page/portal/Internet Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG)]

- [http://www.cmrbarcelona.org/es/sobre_el_CMR/index.html Centre of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona (CMRB)]

- [http://www.creal.cat/index_esp.htm Centre for Research in Environmental Epidemiology (CREAL)]

- [http://www.iat-prbb.com/ Institute of Advanced Technology (IAT)]

The PRBB compromise is multiple: from generating new knowledge in the health and life sciences to the transfer of technology and knowledge to the enterprise world. Another very important compromise is to train scientific personnel. It is a fact that most of the people who work here are very young, and a good percentage of the more than one thousand people who work in the PRBB building are from abroad. In fact, there are more than thirty different nationalities, so that English is the most common language in our seminars and scientific meetings. The PhD program in Biomedicine is done by the Pompeu Fabra University.

The PRBB has six main research lines which cover from the molecular to the populational level. These are:

- Biomedical informatics and systems biology

- Gene regulation and epigenetics

- Cellular and developmental biology

- Pharmacology and clinical research

- Human genetics and evolutionary biology

- Epidemiology and public health

It also contains several technological platforms – a node of the National Centre of Genotyping (CEGEN), the National Institute of Bioinformatics (INB) and the Catalonian Antidoping Laboratory (IMIM) – as well as services that include an animal house, a conference hall and a business development department.

The PRBB centres have assumed collective commitments with respect to the quality of their activity and to prevent integrity problems on the research that takes place in them. In this sense they have created a [http://www.prbb.org/eng/part01/p06.htm Code of Good Scientific Practices] common for all the PRBB centres.