SILICON CASTLE
[EDIT/LIFE-SCI: Liège, March 19] There are 130 research centers and 290 biotech businesses in the Euroregion; and, although the separate national entities or sub-regions are smaller players, the cross-border entity has major potential, comparable with the Boston region in the US - which plays a key role in the industry worldwide. The location and the potential, combined with the attractions and top pay for post-docs at the University of Liège, are giving the area brand status. With the help of a multi-million subsidy from the European Union’s Interreg IV matched funding program, a new project has started up there: ‘Alma in Silico’, or what we are calling, ‘Silicon Castle’. Alma stands for the Alma Mater - for the cooperation among the universities, with Giga-Research from the University of Liège, the Maastricht University Medical Center, and the universities of Hasselt and Aachen. They are going to develop, coordinate, and run a high-tech (silicon) infrastructure for systems biology. Businesses and research will have the option of generating experimental data and knowledge on a large-scale. The funding for the EU’s Interreg IV is for the Walloon region, North-Rhine Westphalia, the Flemish community, and both provinces of Dutch and Belgian Limburg. They will be contributing EUR 7.66m. Interreg IV is designed to encourage cooperation between the academic world and the business community, and this subsidy will allow the development of state-of-the-art platforms for biotechnology and bioinformatics. The project builds on to the start, which was provided by the virtual laboratory in the context of the Interreg III ‘Alma Grid’ project. Alma Grid is a strategic alliance of the four university centers which developed a virtual lab to provide an advanced technological infrastructure and expertise for the biotech community in Meuse-Rhine. With the new Alma in Silico [Silicon Castle] project, the network will be developed and run in concrete Euroregional cooperative programs. In recent years, there has been a technological revolution in the life sciences. In the past it was just possible to do research on living organisms at the molecular level and to examine cellular processes. Now the technological potential makes it possible to study biological systems as a whole, and to operate within them. This makes for scientific and medical breakthroughs with new therapeutic options in areas such as cancer and cardio-vascular treatment. Alma in Silico is going to be the most important catalyst in making the academic and industrial research potential very strong.
The Château de Colonster, above Liège, on the university campus at Sart Tilman, looks down over the valley of the Ourthe. Recently, it was the location for an important new phase in the development of the cross-border life science cluster in Meuse-Rhine.
http://www.ulg.ac.be/