Case Studies

EuroStemCell Consortium

Expanding the frontiers of scientific research requires knowledge, commitment and dedication from its researchers. But as funding is almost always limited, enabling a geographically dispersed group to collaborate as a single team demands a great deal of imagination and an extremely high level of ingenuity in project management.

EuroStemCell involves academic institutes and organisations from across eight European countries. It is an integrated project of the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme and falls within the priority on Life Sciences, Genomics, and Biotechnology for Health, which aims to advance medicine and quality of life for European citizens. The EU is providing €11.9 million support to the EuroStemCell project during its four year duration.

The EuroStemCell consortium brings together 14 partners, integrating a broad range of disciplines and combining the expertise of the best laboratories in Europe. The centres involved are all international leaders in their respective fields, and collectively provide the skills and technologies necessary to undertake ground-breaking research in the stem cell field. The project does not currently include any work on human embryonic stem cells.

The consortium is coordinated by the Neurobiology Division of the Wallenberg Neuroscience Centre in Sweden, a joint venture between one of the world's oldest universities, Lund, and its sister institute, Lund University Hospital, together with Institute for Stem Cell Research in Edinburgh. It involves more than 100 scientists and includes a large number of sub-projects, each of which requires complex Europe-wide interaction.

With limited funding, a tight project deadline and a geographical spread that would tax the ingenuity and resources of the most sophisticated corporation, the project management team needed to find a way of creating a work environment that would allow unlimited collaboration at the lowest possible cost - both in financial and human resource terms.

It was quickly realised that web based conferencing would provide the answer, but with just 30 days available for a trial period of testing different solutions, the selection process was necessarily highly methodical. After an extensive cost-benefit analysis involving a wide range of possible solutions, the consortium decided Marratech was the only web-based conferencing system capable of providing high levels of interactivity with quality of sound and video plus the lowest life-cycle costs. Ease of use, low maintenance and effective technical support were also key considerations in their choice.

Using Marratech on laptops and PCs equipped with headsets and webcams, the group conducts regular collaborative web meetings with up to 18 participants at any one time, as well as numerous ad-hoc meetings between smaller groups.

According to systems administrator, Tomas Bjõrlund, the geographic distribution of the consortium’s participants and its restricted funding means using Marratech is the only way that regular collaborative sessions are possible. He says the take up has been impressive: "When we have our peak periods, we have around three to four meetings a week, but I think that this will go up. Now that people are up to speed and see the advantages, they will use it for innumerable smaller and ad-hoc meetings."

As well a systems administrator, Mr Björlund's work includes research at the Disease Modeling sub-unit of the Neurobiology division at Wallenberg Neuroscience Center, studying neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. His speciality is medical imaging using magnetic resonance imaging and his scientific background is biomedicine and technical mathematics. His systems administration role includes internet conferencing, content management framework, construction of the department web site, and administration of network infrastructure and its multiple servers.

Despite the reach of the project, Marratech's demands on the system administrator were reasonably modest. Björlund estimates a total set up time for the entire installation and all user training was about 60 hours. As a result, institutions and researchers form across Europe are able to meet and collaborate form their computers bringing new levels of efficiency and speeding progress in what could otherwise be a difficult working environment

Overall, the collaborative activities of the consortium will lay the ground work for taking stem cell technology to the clinic in the form of well characterised cell lines and a solid pre-clinical skills and knowledge base, bringing the prospect of far reaching benefits for our health and well-being.