19. - 20. Juli 2023, Freiburg (Germany)
Kick-Off Event
Plenty of room for exchange of ideas and creative moments
The kick-off event of the Clusters4Future network nanodiag BW inspired more than one hundred participants
On July 19 and 20, the auditorium of Freiburg University provided the setting for an extremely successful kick-off event of the future cluster nanodiag BW: discussion rounds across disciplinary boundaries, intensive talks about technological and organizational challenges, as well as valuable input from experienced cluster managers, company founders and know-how carriers helped the interdisciplinary team of 36 research institutions and industrial companies to get off to an ideal start in their ambitious project.
Clusters4Future network as a platform for rapid technology transfer to medical applications
The 14 Clusters4Future networks funded by the BMBF are directly linked to top academic research and are intended to transfer the resulting innovations into applications over a period of nine years. In this way, research and development results will reach people's everyday lives more quickly and, at the same time, Germany's role as an innovation leader in global competition will be secured. The name nanodiag BW is a combination of the terms nanopores, diagnostics and Baden-Württemberg. Nanopores are channels with molecular dimensions. Applied in biosensors, they can be used to characterize and distinguish individual molecules. nanodiag BW uses this technology to analyze proteins associated with diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's or cancer. As a result, affected people can benefit as well as diagnosing physicians and treating hospitals.
To achieve this, a deeper understanding of the nanopores themselves must first be brought about: Naturally occurring "biological" nanopores must be specifically manufactured and used. The measurement results must be validated for reproducibility and informative value, and the medical references must always be kept in mind or, in many cases, have yet to be recognized and investigated in detail. One of the cluster projects is pursuing the idea of "reproducing" the shapes of biological nanopores to a certain extent with the aid of state-of-the-art semiconductor technology and process engineering. Ideally, it will even be possible to produce nanopores optimized for diagnostic or therapeutic tasks on miniaturized semiconductor chips in a way that could not be realized by nature itself.
Congratulations and funding given along the way
At the kick-off event, numerous guests of honor and speakers from politics and science expressed their solidarity with the innovation network and wished the project every success. In an initial implementation phase, 15 million euros from the Clusters4Future initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and seven-digit funding from the Ministry of Economics and the Ministry of Science of the State of Baden-Württemberg are available. After three years, the results will be evaluated by a jury. The scientific, technological and economic progress achieved by then will be evaluated, as will the further development of the cluster strategy and the project ideas for continuing the project in the subsequent three-year period.
