Kick-off meeting of the Collaborative Research Centre: “From the fundamentals of biofabrication to functional tissue models”
The kick-off meeting of the new Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) (“Transregio TR-Sonderforschungsbereich”): “From the fundamentals of biofabrication to functional tissue models” took place on 31st January 2018 at the Institute of Biomaterials, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, hosted by Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini. The German Science Foundation (DFG) approved the establishment of the new CRC in November 2017. This is a large scale, highly interdisciplinary research effort involving principal investigators from different disciplines and faculties from three universities, namely University of Würzburg, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU) and University of Bayreuth with a funding volume of about 10 Million Euro for initially 4 years. The coordinator of the new CRC, Prof. Juergen Groll from University of Würzburg and the spokespersons for Erlangen (FAU) and Univ. of Bayreuth, Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini and Prof. Thomas Scheibel, respectively, attended the meeting. The governing bodies of the CRC were elected at the meeting. Biofabrication, the core scientific discipline in this CRC, involves the application of 3D printing techniques to process living cells and biomaterials (hydrogels) simultaneously in order to obtain complex, tissue and organ mimicking 3D structures.
