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By covering the costs for research and clinical Phase 1 development, the funding will accelerate potential treatments for the 10 million new tuberculosis patients diagnosed every year. BioVersys is working on novel antibacterial drugs. The spinoff's tuberculosis programme builds on technology developed at ETH Zurich and addresses a new set of targets that help overcome the resistance of the tuberculosis-causing pathogenic bacteria.

Both nature and technology rely on integral feedback mechanisms to ensure that systems resist external perturbations. D-BSSE researchers have now used synthetic biology to design a new mechanism of this sort from scratch. For the first time, they have introduced it into a living cell as an artificial genetic regulatory network. This will be a useful tool for cell therapy in medicine and for biotechnology.

Alay Shah from the University of Texas at Austin, USA, is joining Professor Dagmar Iber's lab for summer 2019 with a ThinkSwiss Scholarship. He will combine different high-end image analysis technologies to study basic developmental mechanisms of the lungs. The ThinkSwiss Scholarship programme is managed by the Embassy of Switzerland in Washington, D.C.

On 20 June, the TWIST (Towards more Women In Science and Technology) initiative will hold a panel discussion on "Working culture difference between academia and industry - what can we learn from each other?" Apart from hearing about different career paths, panel members will share their experiences with gender measures in different environments. Registration required.

D-BSSE is planning its biannual retreat to grasp on the diversity of expertise and interests in the department. In a bottom-up approach, 22 workshops are being offered by D-BSSE members and externals. The topics range from community building activities to developing methodological skills in research, from strengthening soft skills and critical thinking to learning about the dilemmas and pitfalls in publishing scientific work. The Retreat with almost 200 participants takes place on 28 June.

The Botnar Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH) is seeking bold and novel flagship projects from established research groups at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel and its University Children's Hospital, and the Swiss Public Health Institute, which generate tangible results in paediatrics to prevent diseases, improve diagnoses and develop new treatments. Submit your multi-investigator project before 15 July.

This summer, Renato Paro, founding director of the D-BSSE and pioneer of epigenetics, is becoming a professor emeritus. On this occasion, on 26 June colleagues and friends of Renato Paro get together at D-BSSE to acknowledge Renato's advances and achievements along his academic career.

The clinical use of genomics tools, for example in the context of infectious diseases, is on the rise. But it still represents a daunting analytical task, in particular when it comes to identifying and quantifying the variants of a virus in a patient. The first speaker of the in silico talks series of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), Niko Beerenwinkel introduces V-Pipe, a new end-to-end pipeline tool to mine viral genomes and improve clinical diagnostics. Watch his recorded lecture.