ERA CoBioTech Research & Innovation Hack in Brussels

As the coordinator of the ERA-IB project “funCHI”, Bruno Moerschbacher attended the ERA-CoBioTech meeting in Brussels to present this project. ERA (European Research Area) projects are European projects co-financed by national funding agencies. ERA-IB for Industrial Biotechnology projects was one of the most successful ERAs, and it has now joined forces with other similar ERAs in the new ERA CoBioTech, aiming to promote systems biology and synthetic biology as technology drivers to speed up research and innovation in industrial biotechnology. Around one hundred participants representing ca. 50 projects met to discuss and exchange ideas in a stimulating atmosphere. What was special about this meeting were the people involved - all of them interested in collaboration and actively pursuing international and mostly interdisciplinary, often also intersectoral (i.e. with partners from Academia and Industry) projects. Thus, there were unusually open discussions, after the talks, during the poster sessions, and in the breaks. As usual, Bruno came back with a long list of ideas which the whole group will now have to bear.