1-week secondment at AiCuris, Wuppertal (Germany)

Matthias, Federico and Arancha at AiCuris

In November, we, Matthias (ESR8) and Federico (ESR14), had the possibility to spend a week at AiCuris, one of our consortium partners and host of Arancha (ESR13).

During our stay in the lovely city of Wuppertal we not only had the chance to ride the famous Schwebebahn across the industrial area of Bayer and to visit a traditional German Christmas market, but we participated in a workshop about Project Management, Leadership, Teamwork, Drug Discovery and Legal implications of contracts and agreements. Among the practical activities, an introduction to advanced Excel functions was also included, which is very useful for data analysis and of particular interest for young scientists in training.

Apart from this, we were included into the day-to-day life in a small biotech company like AiCuris and performed a standard minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) experiment. The MIC experiment was performed through a semi-high throughput screening approach, in which several compounds were tested against different bacterial strains at decreasing concentration in order to identify which ones were able to inhibit bacterial growth, with the hope of finding potential new antimicrobial molecules.  

Schwebebahn, Wuppertal, Germany