We recently announced our partnership with SynBio Catalyse UK which aims to foster entrepreneurship in the industry across the UK. It was fantastic to see many of you at the introductory event at the end of term but if you couldn’t make it, not to worry. Now is the time when you can get involved! 

Applications are now open for you to take part in the programme and the deadline is Monday 21st December! You do not need to have a team, idea or background in biology or biotech to participate. You will meet people from a variety of fields interested in using biotech to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.

Are you interested in biotech and entrepreneurship? Do you want to learn how to build a start-up? 
Apply to the SynBioUK Catalyse Programme here: https://bit.ly/37nuFkZ 
Deadline: Monday 21st December

The Oxford University Biotech Society has teamed up with SynBio Oxford and SynBioUK to run the Catalyse Program, a series of workshops in Hilary term culminating in a 3-day Biohackathon.

We welcome applications from undergrads, postgrads and post-docs. Please feel free to contact us on biotechnology.society@studentclubs.ox.ac.uk or by messaging us on Facebook if you have any questions.

We were delighted to host Prof Sir Munir Pirmohamed who discusses the past, present and future of Pharmogenetics and personalised medicine in this lecture. At the end, he takes questions on his work chairing the Commission on Human Medicines which helped approved the first Covid-19 vaccine for use in the West.

Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed (MB ChB, PhD, FRCPE, FRCP, FBPhS, FMedSci) is David Weatherall Chair in Medicine at the University of Liverpool, and a Consultant Physician at the Royal Liverpool University Hospital. He is Director of the MRC Centre for Drug Safety Sciences, and Director of the Wolfson Centre for Personalised Medicine. He is also Director of HDR North. He is an inaugural NIHR Senior Investigator, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences in the UK, Commissioner on Human Medicines and is a non-executive director of NHS England, and has been appointed as President of British Pharmacological Society. He was awarded a Knights Bachelor in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2015. His research focuses on personalised medicine, clinical pharmacology and drug safety

We are very proud to be co-hosting the Oxbridge Varsity Science Symposium along with The Oxford and Cambridge Biological Societies, the Oxford and Cambridge Chemical Societies, the Oxford Physics Society, and the Pharmacological and Biomedical Societies. The event is a five-day symposium which will bring together the best in research from Oxbridge!

We would like to invite undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers at all stages of their careers, to present their work or academic interests to our communities as a 10-20 minute talk, followed by a brief Q&A session. We are very flexible regarding the lengths and topics of talks, and welcome talks from all areas of science, as well as interdisciplinary ones! The exact format and timing of sessions will be arranged with the speakers, based on topic areas and speaker availability. To take part, feel free to either contact any of the participating societies, email oxbridge@biosoc.co.uk or fill in this form: https://tinyurl.com/varsitysci to submit your ideas for a 10-20 minute talk! The sessions will most likely be presented in two ways – as a Zoom conference and as a YouTube livestream on the Oxbridge BioSoc channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/OxbridgeBioSoc), with questions being asked from both Zoom and the livestream. You can also find out more about the event and how you can be involved here:https://www.facebook.com/events/356998161964217?active_tab=about

In this difficult time, we believe that it is more important than ever for us to collaborate more closely as Oxbridge science societies, and to bring the exciting research conducted at the two universities and affiliated institutes closer to student communities and the wider world. We therefore hope that you will join us for this inaugural joint Oxbridge symposium, hopefully the first of many to come!

We are collaborating with the Oxford University Pharmacology Society to bring you a new virtual event on Covid-19 screening by instantly and remotely testing cough patterns on the 18th of June, 5pm. We will be joined by the CEO of Novoic, a digital biotech company, whose technology could screen the whole nation for coronavirus in a single day – using only cough patterns. Sign up here and learn more about how you can get involved!

Following Professor Zitzmann’s talk in the recent Covid conversations, we are very excited to have the lovely Dr. JL Kiappes with us to answer your questions about how the Zitzmann lab is exploring options to treat coronavirus. JL is a Biochemistry tutor at Corpus Christi and a member of the Zitzmann lab. He will also be accompanied by two other antiviral experts from the Zitzmann lab. Catch up on her talk here and find all the details on our upcoming event here on our Facebook page and on our Eventbrite here.

Welcome to OUBT!