On September 11 and 12, our SaxoCell cluster came together for its second Consortium and Scientific Advisory Board (SAB) Meeting. With about 80 participants on site and more online, we spent two wonderful days full of interesting presentations, discussions and talks. Apart from delegates of all our projects and platforms, our SAB members as well as representatives of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and Projektträger Jülich (PtJ) attended the meeting and gave us valuable input.
Hosted at Fraunhofer IZI in Leipzig, our meeting kicked off with a warm welcome by our speaker Ulrike Köhl who shared her review on our challenges and achievements in the past year. Next, Alexandra Vogel, representing the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, gave an overview on the application and review process for phase 2 of the Clusters4Future initiative.
Soon, the scientific part of the programme started with our project and platform presentations as well as a poster session at lunch time and our first break-out session in the afternoon. In the hands-on break-out session, SaxoCell members could choose from a number of topics such as artificial intelligence and automation, animal models, intellectual property rights or cluster communication.
The keynote speech by Christof von Kalle from Berlin Institute of Health - who connected via video conference - reflected on the German national programme on gene and cell therapy. Our first day was rounded off with plenty of opportunities to get to know each other across our projects and platforms. Everyone enjoyed good food and drinks and lots of conversations at this mild late summer’s night.
The next day, we jumped straight into our remaining project pitches, again with room for discussion afterwards. Conversations were presumed during lunch break and finally our results from both break-out sessions were presented. We learned for example that artificial intelligence and automation are yet to be captured more intensely for our research.
Our speaker Ezio Bonifacio closed the meeting with his outlook to the next funding phase - summarizing two days of great teamwork peppered with so many personal encounters stimulating fruitful exchange and coalescence.
At the close of day two, our SaxoCell Verein was founded and we are now eagerly waiting for confirmation from the register of associations.
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We would like to thank all participants! It was wonderful to see how our cluster is constantly growing and developing! We take pride in working with so many great experts in cell and gene therapy across science and industry and look forward to everything that the future will bring!
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