The Center for Cooperative Research in Biosciences CIC bioGUNE celebrates its seventh anniversary with a plenary lecture from Dr. Luis Serrano, Head of the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona, entitled “Systems biology analysis of a small bacterium: lessons in humility”.

CIC bioGUNE currently employs a team of around 140 researchers from 15 different countries, and in 2011 published more than 60 papers in scientific journals, with an average impact factor of 6, and more than 600 citations.

The Center is fully integrated into the national and international scientific arena. The projects initiated in 2011 include studies funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH; on hepatocellular carcinoma, together with the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California); joint research with the Mount Sinai School of Medicine into disease variants in porphyria (the company Owl is also involved); a collaboration with the group of Prof. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2009); a joint European project with the French company Cellectis and the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO); or an international research project as part of the Centre for Biomedical Network Research on Rare Diseases (CIBERER) into the causes underlying the conditions associated with progressive dementia in diseases such as Creutzfeld-Jacob disease.

CIC bioGUNE also participates in numerous mobility- and training-related networks and activities, such as UPStream (an international network concerning ubiquitin-related post-translational modifications); Marie Curie grants (for translational research in the field of prostate cancer); or the Cost action (network of hypoxia researchers).

As well as generating knowledge, disseminating its results and collaborating with companies, the Center contributes to wealth generation by way of knowledge and technology transfer. In this respect, it has been awarded eight patents, two of which have been licensed.