Mark Richardson (CEO) and Jeremy Webb (Academic Director) of the National Biofilms Innovation Centre (https://biofilms.ac.uk/) visited Newcastle today to tell us about their progress with the Centre in the 6 months since the initial start date. They have done a great job of engaging with the UK biofilms research community, which is spread across a very wide range of institutions. Biofilms are microbial communities associated with interfaces and encased within a self-produced polymeric matrix. They cause all sorts of problems in industrial settings, including fouling all sorts of processing plants and contaminating food and water. Biofilms are also a major problem in healthcare, since microorganisms in biofilms are typically up to 1,000 fold more tolerant to antimicrobial agents than the equivalent free-living cells. At the same time, biofilms can be an opportunity, for example to engineer microbial communities for treating wastewater, producing energy or recovering toxic agents from waste.

There is a great deal of interest in the field of Microbial Biofilms at Newcastle University and we had some engaging discussions about how Newcastle University can get involved in NBIC. One of the strengths of this institution is that we have a strong base for interdisciplinary research (see my previous blog post!), which is so critical for solving the types of issues that are related to biofilms.

I will look forward to future collaborations with NBIC. Thanks to Mark and Jeremy for visiting, to all those who attended and to Grant, Ian, Dana and Vicky for their excellent talks!

For researchers seeking funding for proof-of-concept projects in this area, see the following funding call: https://biofilms.ac.uk/nbic-1st-proof-of-concept-call-now-open-till-24th-aug-2018/