The CEITEC research institute at Masaryk University has begun to work more closely with Vienna’s VBCF research institute. Thanks to the Interreg AT-CZ cross-border cooperation programme, they were able to develop a catalogue of services for private companies and academic institutions together with three other centres. The level of expertise offered through these new services will be significantly higher and they will also be innovative and more easily available.
The pilot project will lead to a more efficient supply of technological equipment, knowledge, and experience in the life and materials sciences and will also involve CEITEC VUT, the international clinical research centre FNUSA-ICRC, and IST Austria.
These centres have been working together for several years. As they discovered, not only are they not direct competitors in the services they offer to other users, but they can complement each other’s offerings. “All the centres participating in the project have core facilities – labs and equipment – that can also be used by other research institutions or private companies. We worked together to find options for strengthening our cooperation in this area and using the full potential of our facilities,” says Kateřina Vágnerová, who manages the project.
Besides the catalogue, the researchers have been working on a database of potential users and plan to further develop the currently used measurement methods and technology procedures and organise presentations to show them to potential users. Apart from the workshops, the cooperation should also lead to open access to innovation.
In other words, when a researcher looking for certain data sends a request to one of the institutions, all colleagues from the other participating institutions will also be informed about the inquiry. Together, they will offer a complex solution to the researcher, which would not be possible without this cross-border cooperation.
CEITEC researchers have also been enjoying the benefits of this collaboration. “Together with our colleagues from Vienna, we have been working on a method that will give us a competitive advantage in the Czech market, but we already know that it will also bring us customers from Austria,” says Boris Tichý, head of the genomics lab.