BIOPOL has successfully hired fifteen early stage researchers (ESRs). These fifteen early stage researchers are enrolled into local PhD programs and each ESR is working on a particular clearly defined research project. After all fellows had been hired a fellow own meeting was organised by the fellows themselves with the support of the BIOPOL management in Rome, Italy.
The annual meeting of BIOPOL was held in Barcelona, Spain and was organised together with the Spanish network of excellence in mechanobiology. BIOPOL principal investigators and fellows gave scientific presentations. The first annual meeting was combined with a first workshop on scientific communications for the BIOPOL fellows. Workshop II with the topic “Project management and innovation” was held in February 2017 in Berlin, Germany. Fellows also participated in the BIOYES business plan competition in autumn of 2017. As a major training event BIOPOL organised an international open summer school on the topic “Mechanobiology of polarised cells”. The summer school took place at the ” Ecole de Physique” in Les Houches, France in April 2018.
Workshop III on the topic of entrepreneurship was delivered as a two-days webinar. The final workshop (workshop IV) on career development was delivered in September 2018. The workshop took place in Harrogate, UK , where also the final scientific meeting of BIOPOL was held. The final meeting “Physics of Cells: From Biochemical to Mechanical” comprised also a BIOPOL only satellite meeting open to all conference attendees. All abstracts are published in a conference book. In addition to these main training events, BIOPOL fellows have performed a set of experimental training stations and multiple secondments to other consortium members.
Overview of results and dissemination: Scientific advances have been made in particular in understanding mechanisms of mechanosensing (of cilia, caveolae, and mechanosensitive ion channels) and of mechanotransduction (YAP, actin cytoskeleton) as well as in mechanics of endocytosis and tissue formation (drosophila wing). Scientific results have been disseminated at scientific conferences in form of posters or scientific oral presentations, each of the fellows has presented their scientific results at at least one international conference, but in most cases fellows attended three and more conferences in total. Furthermore, each of the fellows has performed a minimum of one outreach activity (open day, scientific fairs etc.) per year, where different audiences (children, adults) of the general public were informed about BIOPOL’s mission and about research results so far achieved. Part of the scientific results have been exploited already in the form of scientific publications, and additional publications are in preparation or planned. JPK and MIMETAS have exploited their research results by implementation of new product software and improved OrganoPlate design and functionality, respectively.
