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Brno plans science center /02. 11. 2011/
Answering the call for innovation that spurs development, the Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC) has launched operations that will yield a 10-facility life sciences research center in Brno involving nearly 600 researchers and 1,200 students by 2014.
The 200 million euro project, funded mostly by the European Union, aims to pair general scientific research with targeted projects to develop or improve specific products for the private sector. "There are universities with expertise, then small startups build a critical mass of investments, and then the large companies come," said Tomáš Hruda, CEITEC's executive director.
Companies can access the center's infrastructure and equipment or work with institute staffers. Alternatively, private firms can provide their own scientists to work alongside CEITEC scientists. Already, the center has attracted around 200 companies, about 100 of which have declared their research intent. The majority of these are Czech-based, though the center is keen on attracting more foreign firms over the next decade, Hruda said.
The CEITEC cluster of companies in Brno, an association of firms and research institutions focused on bioinformatics, started in 2006, is among those cooperating. BioVendor, a CEITEC cluster company, will work with the CEITEC center on research-seeking means of earlier diagnosing of diseases common in post-industrial societies like obesity, diabetes and certain cancers.
"The main advantage is the cooperation with experts working with unique and extremely expensive scientific equipment, located in our city," said Vladimír Kolář, a BioVendor marketing director. "We will start improvement of our current products and evaluation of new products. … The expected results of the intended cooperation will be discovering new original biomarkers, targets for diagnostics and therapy, and new technologies."
The center will be built on Masaryk University's Bohunice campus and the University of Technology's Pod Palackého vrchem campus. Core facilities will encompass genomics, proteomics, molecular and functional imaging and structural analysis, nanotechnology, single-crystal X-ray diffraction, crypto-electron microscopy and tomography.
But before the doors open on new research facilities in 2014, the center will be well into research, which began this year. "We're not building on a 100 percent green field," Hruda said. Currently, in the first phase, researchers are working on the campuses of cooperating universities, while other scientists are involved in international training and cooperation.
CEITEC will be benchmarked against top institutions in Western Europe and the United States, Hruda said, adding there will be "nowhere to hide," when it comes to competing on science's top stages. The location of the center in Brno will also allow the center's largely medical-based research to be tested and utilized, as Brno also boasts some of the country's largest specialized hospitals. "It's not theoretical, like we're in the middle of nowhere doing research no one is interested in," Hruda said. "There are real live connections to real-life applications."
Source: Praguepost.com, 26.10.2011. Full article can be found here.
