Max Planck Society opens South American outpost

Partner institute in Buenos Aires will focus on neuroscience and drug development.

Ana Belluscio

The Max Planck Society's first outpost in South America has opened in Buenos Aires.Ministry of Science, Technology and Productive Innovation

Germany's Max Planck Society has expanded to South America. Earlier this month, the research organization opened, with the National Research Council of Argentina (CONICET), the Biomedicine Research Institute of Buenos Aires (IBioBA–MPSP), its first South American partner institute.
The institute will be led by Eduardo Arzt, a former investigator at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich, Germany, and the only member of the Max Planck Society (MPS) who is based in South America. He says the IBioBA–MPSP will be a major boon to Artgentine scientists. "This new institute will help Argentina tighten bonds with the international scientific community, intensify the interchange of scientific knowledge, and facilitate access to top notch technology," he says.
The creation of the institute in Buenos Aires is the result of Arzt's 20-year relationship with the MPS. Florian Holsboer, director of the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry, says he continued to work with Arzt after he returned to Argentina in 1992. So when Peter Gruss, president of MPS, wanted to make the society more international, "I proposed having a partner institute in Buenos Aires", Holsboer says.
The partner institute will focus mainly on neurosciences, drug design, cellular plasticity and stem-cell research, says Arzt. "In neurosciences, one of our main research areas, we are going to study neurological and psychiatric pathologies with a strong emphasis on depression," he says.
The overall goal is to create an integrative platform not only to study the underlying molecular and cellular mechanisms involved in neurological, psychiatric and metabolic diseases, but also to develop targets for the design of new drugs for those conditions.
The IBioBA–MPSP will also try to bridge what Holsboer considers a gap between academic investigation and private research in industry. "Today we have great findings in neurosciences but they don't reach the market. There is not a good interface between basic and clinical science in academia and industry," he says, "and that is why we will try, in the second phase, to attract private investors to the institute, with the goal of developing and commercializing products in the future."
Any patents granted for work done at the IBioBA–MPSP will be shared by the two partner institutions and any third parties involved in a given project, based on their level of participation.

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The IBioBA–MPSP will start with 10 research groups, involving around 50 scientists, a number that is eventually expected to grow to around 120. Staff and investigators' salaries will be paid by the government, but the $4 million spent so far on equipment was jointly funded by the Argentine state, international subsidies and cooperation projects with the Max Planck Society. The IBioBA–MPSP is located at the Scientific and Technological Pole, a 45,000-square-metre, US$60-million, campus also inaugurated this month.
Six of the research group leaders are Argentine scientists who are returning from jobs abroad. Molecular biologist María de la Paz Fernández left in 2008 to pursue her postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. She will return in 2012, to run one of the three neurosciences laboratories at IBioBA–MPSP. "When I started thinking about having my own lab, my first option was Argentina. Having the unique opportunity to work in a world-level institution in Buenos Aires is a rare privilege," she says.
The IBioBA–MPSP will develop scientific ties with other institutes on the campus. "We cannot afford to have everyone just working in their own laboratory and not knowing what the group next door is doing," says Fernández. And some international collaborations have already been set up with biomedical institutes in countries including Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, to develop a biomedical training network.