More Background

The start....

Swegene was a five year (2000-2005) joint programme within the field of Functional Genomics. The participating universities were Lund University, Göteborg University, and Chalmers Institute of Technology. The programme was co-financed by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg’s Foundation (KAW) and the universities, and the aim was to build up service facilities, technique development programmes and a post doc programme to meet with new opportunities in the post genomic era. According to the agreement between KAW and the universities in 2001 the KAW-funding of Swegene should continue for 5 years and then be taken over by the universities.

The fast technology development in combination with advances in bioinformatics has provided an opportunity to perform large-scale analyses of biological molecules. In order to exploit this wealth of potential information, standard methods of biological analysis have to be redesigned and new ones invented to function on a massively parallel scale. The aim of Swegene was simply to offer the new generation of biologists access to new technologies and large-scale analyses as well as new bioinformatic tools.

During 2004, five of the most successful Swegene service centres in Lund established SCIBLU – Swegene Centre for Integrative Biology at Lund University. The centres are the Swegene Proteomic Centre, Microarray Resource Centre, DNA Microarray Centre (Genomics), Bioinformatics Centre and the Protein Chips Development programme.

The specific aim of SCIBLU was to move to the centres together physically at BMC and to develop an integrative approach to solve complex biological problems, by developing and new techniques and instruments for biological and medical research and offer these to the research community. By creating SCIBLU, centres from various fields have been brought together into a tightly integrated unit with a common soft- and hardware platform. This multidisciplinary co-operation between diverse centres and researchers will break down many of the obstacles caused by compartmentalization of research into distinct subjects.

Since 2006 the university is financing the cost for technical personnel and part of the cost for infrastructure. However, the development part of SCIBLU, which focus on the development of new techniques and instruments, is not included in the financial plan from the university. Since these projects are of outmost importance for the research program CREATE Health (Strategic Centre for Translational Cancer Research), which is involving several of the managers of SCIBLU, they will receive continuous funding thorough CREATE Health.

Visit the CREATE Health website

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