On the 15th of October the fourth International Exhibition and Conference «Bioindustry – 2014», started within the St. Petersburg International Health Forum. The exhibition is held at the site of the newly opened modern congress and exhibition center EXPOFORUM.
«Bioindustry – 2014» is a set of scientific, educational, business and exhibition events, during which the participants have a chance to demonstrate their innovative biotechnological solutions and developments, discuss topical issues of creation the infrastructurefor the development of biotechnologies, as well as the sphere of the bio-industry as a whole.
Valery Kolabutin, the chairman of the Health Committee of St. Petersburg, Pavel Soltan, the deputy chairman of the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, Rimma Sachunova, the deputy chairman of the Committee on Tourism Development, Thomas Stenzel, the general manager of Messe Duesseldorf Moscow LLC and other representatives of local authorities and the sphere of the bio-industry attended the gala opening ceremony. The eminent guests wished their colleagues productive and successful work on the forum, as well as good health.
As Valery Kalabutin said, the scale of the new complex also defines the scope of the forum. In 2014, Bioindustry is held for the second time, but during the year the number and the geography of the participants increased significantly. In the exhibition only, there were 54 companies from different countriesincluding those from Germany, Poland, Czech Republic and Korea, representing their innovative solutions and developments. The ITMO University is among them as well. A number of projects were presented on the University booth in the exhibition. For example, the National Research and Production Center of Rejuvenation Technologies, maintaining its slogan "We are in love with life",within the booth demonstrated some functional food, cosmetics and biological substances that contribute to the maintenance of health, long life and development of creative potential. The center conducts its developments in conjunction with Alexander Ishevsky, dean of the Food Technologies Faculty and professor at the ITMO University.
"Today the mankind faces a serious challenge: not only to live long, but to live long and actively", Natalia Novikova, the head of training and methodical center, PhD of biological sciences, says. "To support this activity we are conducting innovative developments and we already have a couple of drinks in our arsenal: brewer's yeast with silybum, soft drinks with vitamins and minerals, sweets and other products that don't make any harm for health, but rather strengthen it and solve different problems".
The developments of the bioinformatics lab at the ITMO University, that were presented at the Forum, can't be tasted or touched as the main direction of the units' research is the study of the conformational mobility of proteins, its modeling and prediction. University staff currently developed mathematical methods, algorithms and software that are useful for the study of obtained biological data, and in particular, helpful in the study of the mobility of proteins. This program, being based on fundamental research, will be hardly useful for an ordinary user, but it will be indispensable for pharmaceutical companies for medicines development and predicting their activity. In general, as noted by Sergei Knyazev, the employee of the bioinformatics lab at the ITMO University, the prospective consumer of the software is bio-industry and the scientific community. "It is very important to investigate the mobility of proteins, because they change their functionality by changing their shape. This process occurs in living cells of all organisms and almost all the processes employ proteins. And we, while studying this mobility, can get some idea of how it all can occur. We are faced with sophisticated task - it is difficult to simulate the mobility of the proteins, but we have a certain model, which we offer to community and which we continue to explore, generalizing it as a web service in the end".
Another project of the ITMO University, which was presented at the booth, is widely used today by various companies throughout Russia. Devices for thermophysical measurements that were developed by interdepartmental training laboratory Innovative Technologies are in demand in many areas of science and industry. For example, the thermophysical properties of different substances must be taken into account when drilling wells, constructing underground tunnels, in the sphere of medicine it is often necessary to determine the thermophysical characteristics of tissues and tumors - the range of device's applications is wide. According to Vasily Krylov, the engineer in the laboratory Innovative Technologies, "The feature of the project is that the laboratory can create a device for some concrete technical tasks and therefore for the customer himself it'll be easier to use it. In addition, the price range of our products favorably differs from its foreign counterparts".
Within the framework of the business program of the Forum opening day a plenary session occurred, the topic of which was “Healthy Cities”.During the meeting, representatives of the Health Committee of St. Petersburg and the “Healthy cities, districts, towns” Association discussed some pressing healthcare problems with the participants.Petersburg maintaining people's health experience in the framework of the “Healthy Cities” program was also demonstrated at the meeting.
The ITMO University and other forum participants are looking forward for the next two days of fruitful work on the business and exhibition events."Today, biotechnology is one of the priority areas of development of the ITMO University. And we hope that the demonstration of the scientific achievements of our university at the international exhibition «Bioindustry – 2014» will attract new partners and contribute to the ITMO brand awareness", Daria Mironova stressed, the head of the research and educational marketing research department at the ITMO University.