B-SMART takes next project steps during 1st Progress Meeting

From 08 to 09 June 2017, the B-SMART consortium came together for its 1st Progress Meeting in Ghent, Belgium to discuss and align the project’s scientific work and further collaboration. The meeting was hosted by B-SMART partner Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) in its premises.

The two meeting days were dedicated to the work progress achieved during the first 5 months of the project and to planning the next steps ahead. On the first day, all consortium members presented their first scientific and management results since project start. The project progress up to date was extensively discussed and all partners had the opportunity to address challenges within the different work packages as well as among the three clusters. In the afternoon, Roosmarijn Vandenbroucke and colleagues from VIB had organised a lab tour at VIB’s BioImaging Facility presenting specialist instrumentation for light and electron microscopy and explaining approaches to answer complex cell biological questions through bio-imaging.

The second day focused on key aspects of project dissemination and an exploitation session on central issues of Intellectual Property (IP) and IP management in Horizon 2020 was held. Expected exploitable results to be obtained within B-SMART were presented and further discussions will be continued during the course of the project to maximise B-SMART’s output and impact.

Overall, the meeting was very successful and enabled vivid and fruitful discussions among the entire consortium as well as in small groups. Project coordinator Raymond Schiffelers was very pleased with the outcome, considered the meeting as highly productive and thanked everyone for the proactive and useful input. The next progress meeting will take place in six months in Malvern, United Kingdom and will be combined with a one day workshop on Malvern techniques for nanocarriers characterization.