Our institution

Innovation

In 2022, we had 23 innovation projects in active development. We identified a growing number of digital projects with innovative potential in mental health, NCDs and environment, climate change response and migrant health, as well as two newly funded European projects (EChiLiBRiST and CATALYSE). We are creating a spin-off company using artificial intelligence to predict injuries, and are assessing the creation of a spin-off with a platform to develop new antibiotics. We signed three co-ownership and exploitation agreements (one for a monoclonal antibody against COVID-19, one for an antimalarial molecule and one for a new antimicrobial peptide). We filed eight new patent applications and registered a new software for the detection of future epidemiological clusters and outbreaks.

With other national and international partners, we organised the third edition of the EIT-funded ENERGHY postgraduate course on global health challenges, which brought together 20 young entrepreneurs from 14 different countries.

On Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), we celebrated the first in-house training on participatory research, aimed at better responding to societal needs and meeting funding requirements. We successfully completed the Barcelona CaixaResearch Living Lab, a project involving a variety of social actors to co-create solutions to three major challenges: access to mental health care for migrant populations (resulting in an alliance to evaluate a community intervention co-created with migrant women), healthcare access for people at risk of Chagas disease (resulting in the #VocesDelChagas campaign to raise awareness) and healthy school environments (resulting in the co-creation and implementation of solutions in a school in the Barcelona area).