> Interview: Patrick Boisseau, Coordinator of Nano2Life
Interview: Patrick Boisseau, Coordinator of Nano2Life
Patrick Boisseau
“Nano2Life offers European scientists from different disciplines the opportunity to create synergies and learn how to work together to implement new joint projects and activities”
Interview with Patrick Boisseau - 02/05/2006 (PDF document)
ANNA ALSINA - Barcelona
Nano2Life, the first European Network of Excellence in Nanobiotechnology, was founded with a clear goal: to create synergies between scientists from different disciplines to help develop nanobiotechnology in Europe. The Network is being supported by the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission and has successfully initiated 15 projects in the past two years. Among its activities, Nano2Life organises two large meetings a year, which gather all the participants of the network to discuss future initiatives. The most recent one was held in Sitges (Barcelona), from the 27th to the 29th of March.
EFB: What is the major challenge for Nano2Life?
Patrick Boisseau: “Nanobiotech is a real interdisciplinary area, a cross work of biochemistry, physics, health sciences, informatics and so on. There’s no physical place in the world, even in the US or Japan, no centre large enough to cover all these disciplines in the same place. Almost no organisation can develop fully integrated nano-devices for medical applications by itself. It means that people are forced by nature to work together because nanobiotechnology is a very recent field of research. The major challenge for Nano2Life to help develop nanobiotech in Europe is to make these people get used to working together and understand each other. For example: What are the common points between a clinician, a chemist or an engineer? Barely any, except for their years together in secondary school. Nano2Life offers European scientists from different disciplines the opportunity to create synergies and learn how to work together, not only to get better and faster results but also to implement new joint projects and activities that incorporate all phases of the development of nanobiotechnology.”
EFB: What is the first step to open a dialogue between scientists from different disciplines?
PB: “You have to go back to basics in the basic disciplines such as chemistry and biochemistry so that people have the common background. It could be, for instance, that the last time an engineer heard about molecular genomics was at school, or that a scientist chose to be an engineer because he hated bioengineering. In any case, training people into a new complementary field is the first step of the process. The afternoon prior to the bi-annual meetings of the network Nano2Life offers tutorials on very basic areas such as Biochemistry for Dummies. The sessions are a real success. We’ve already organised more than 10 different tutorials on this and we will continue.”
EFB: Nano2Life’s team has been working for more than 2 years now. How has the network evolved?
PB: “In the beginning nobody knew anybody, the people were very shy and cautious; they wouldn’t present the hot topics at the bi-annual meetings. Two years later, after many meetings with all the participants of the network, people are already connected to each other. I hope in two years time the networking activities will have increased even more. Nano2Life is lucky to be one of the few successful Networks of Excellence, and I think one of the main success factors is that the scientists have a clear commitment to participate in the meetings and in joint projects. After two years of operations, Nano2Life has been quite successful: more than 15 projects have been successfully initiated covering a wide range of topics, from medical applications to environmental monitoring and in vitro diagnostics.”
EFB: The future sounds promising...
PB: “Definitely. If you look at the long-term future, the potential for nanobiotech is so huge that it’s just a question of time and investment in resources. Sometimes you hear people saying it is the Third revolution and in a way, it’s true. Nanobiotechnology could bring totally new concepts that would change significantly the future. To be honest, I don’t know what the future of Nano2Life will be. This project will officially stop the first of February 2008, but we are already working on different follow-ups depending on the different activities we will want to support. This is a long term investment in networking which is really needed in Europe, and not only for academic research but for industry competitiveness.”
EFB: Is Europe offering enough funding to help develop Nanobiotechnology?
PB: “Nano2Life is receiving strong support from the European Commission. It’s true that the Network would do better with more financial resources, but money is not the only success factor. People shouldn’t work together only for economic reasons because when the funding stops everything would collapse. I’m optimistic about the future of Nano2Life, but it needs to be a permanent investment. We are trying to make some kind of follow up for Nano2Life to make it more sustainable, mainly because this area is too young and there’s not enough industry at the moment. To become more sustainable our main asset is the commitment of the people and the organisations to Nano2Life. If Europe would invest two or three times more than now, that wouldn’t mean we would go two or three times further. Money is not the limitation, but the gap between disciplines and organisations. The only way to reach that gap is time, and you cannot reduce time. Let me give you an example. In my organisation in France we started setting up a laboratory run by biologists. It started with three biologists and it went up very quickly to twenty people. As an experiment, we decided to move the biologists to the department of engineering, where they would be surrounded by people with no knowledge about basic cell and molecular biology.”
EFB: What happened?
PB: “This experiment has been done several times in different places. The results are clear. It takes a long time to get some exchanges and cooperation between biologists and engineers. Three to five years is the average time, and even if you invest a lot of money you will not be able to shorten that amount of time. It’s the time needed to learn the basics in other disciplines and interconnect them together. And then again, even if you had doubled the number of scientists you wouldn’t have gone faster.”
EFB: Nano2Life is not focusing on science alone. It has also set up an Ethics Board composed of experts from various fields. What are the main tasks of the Board?
PB: “The Ethics Board is composed of a dozen European experts from many different fields, some of them unusual fields for me such as Humanities, Anthropology, Sociology, Law and Theology. Among the several tasks of the board, one is to inform the scientists what the possible ethical implications of their work are. Many scientists believe there are no ethical issues in their work, and in a way that can be true if they are only looking at their experiment by itself. But they need to understand that when a device is designed for a specific application to be used in a specific environment, some ethical issues may be raised. The Ethics Board also gives advice to scientists regarding any potential ethical issues the projects could raise in the future. Converging technologies for neuroscience applications, for instance, is one of the obvious areas where ethics should be brought in from the beginning because it means addressing brains. In vitro diagnostics implies less ethical issues than in vivo diagnostics, but it could still raise potential ethical problems. Imagine that you were able to diagnose a lot of diseases at the same time. Could we produce in vitro diagnostic devices to be used by the patient at home to detect diseases? What would happen if the disease couldn’t be cured? Can we sell devices that detect cancer at a very early stage? Could you imagine you as a patient being able to make a test at home and discover by yourself that you’re sensitive to a specific kind of cancer? Ethical issues are not focused just on in vivo applications but on many others.
The main task of Nano2Life is to initiate a dialog between the ethicists and the scientific project leaders because they are coming from very different worlds. Scientists that have a limited knowledge about ethics try to do their best to explain to ethicists what they are doing. So far no major ethical issues have been raised by these dialogues, but now that we are addressing some projects in converging technologies I think we will have a deeper discussion. Nano2Life is the only network with this kind of Ethics Board, which has been recognised by the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, a high level group of ethics acting as an advisory board for the European Commission.”
EFB: Has Nano2Life recently launched any targeted initiatives for Cancer?
PB: “The American National Cancer Institute (NCI) launched more than a year ago the Nano for Cancer Initiative. They analyzed what advantages nanotechnologies could bring to each of the stages of cancer from predisposition, screening, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment to recovery and so on. Many projects have been funded from this initiative. Our goal is to implement exactly the same initiative in Europe. Within Nano2Life we already have a group dealing with Nano and Cancer, which among other activities, is organising the Cancer Nanotech Conference [Paris, 16-19 May 2006] with the support of the French National Cancer Institute. Stating that Nano would cure cancer by 2015 would be a lie, but it is a fact that nanobiotechnology has the potential to deliver innovative tools that can transform promising molecular discoveries into benefits for cancer patients.”
EFB: Is Nano2Life taking action to increase the presence of women in Science?
PB: “The well-known figures about the gap between men and women in science mention a ‘leaky pipeline’. The PhD labour is, in all disciplines, 50% men and 50% women. It is at increasingly senior positions such as the professorship level, that the labour statistics by gender change to 15% women and 85% men. Nano2Life is taking action to tackle this question, but this initiative doesn’t come from our network alone. All EC funded projects should propose how to raise the participation of women in science and in management. We have organised several activities such as courses to improve leadership and suggesting actions to promote gender equality on Human Resources management. Among other initiatives, last September we launched a mentoring program to help young women scientists promote their careers by offering them advice, and we are now working on promoting research topics and joint projects addressing women specific diseases such as breast cancer.”
EFB: What is the level of involvement of companies in Nano2Life?
PB: “Prior to the application for our project to the European Commission more than two years ago, we invited twelve companies to our meetings so that they could contribute to the definition of the project. We asked them what they needed, what their wishes were and what commitment they were able to make. They told us very clearly that they didn’t want to be involved in management, but they wanted to have access to information and be involved in the research projects from the early stages. They participate in the meetings and provide information bringing a lot of input in terms of expressing the market needs. As you know, academic partners are often not sufficiently aware of what the market needs are. That’s why companies also play a very important role in improving and implementing our program of activities.”
EFB: In your opinion, which European countries are providing the most support for Nanobiotechnology?
PB: “For historical reasons, Germany would rank first. The German government is ahead thanks to the launch, a few years ago, of a national program to support nanotechnology and nanobiotechnology. The second country in terms of investments and available expertise I would say is France. The United Kingdom is a particular case because it is really good in nanoscience, the most fundamental research and the underlying basis of the development of nanobiotechnology, but for some reason they do not participate significantly in most of the projects. We are in the process of trying to commit them much more in FP7 because the UK has really good scientists and companies, and Europe would definitely benefit from their participation in the future. Spain, although it has had a late emergence, is now running very fast. I’m very impressed by the way the Spanish organisations are able to quickly and efficiently work together with public and private partners. Let me illustrate this with an example. When the European Commission initiated less than a year ago the European Technology Platform on Nanomedicine, the Spanish people were able to organise the Spanish National Technology Platform on Nanomedicine within only 4 to 5 months. No other country has been able to do the same.”
EFB: What’s your vision for Nanobiotechnology?
PB: “The key question for me is what will be the industry leading nanobiotechnology. So far we have biotech and pharmaceutical companies, equipment suppliers, drug carriers and other companies interested one way or another in nanobiotechnology, but none of the industrial sectors is yet leading the field. It means that sooner or later, a specific industry will end up leading the sector, and the direction for future research will depend on who is leading the market at the time.”
Contact Info:
Anna Alsina
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EFB Central Office
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E-mail: anna@efb-central.org