About us
Biotechnology is the use of living systems, organisms or processes to develop or make products of interest to human purposes. The term includes a wide variety of sciences such as genetic engineering, genomics, proteomics, cell and tissue culture or bioinformatics. At the CNB we use all these tools to lead the biotechnology research in Spain. We work to unlock the secrets of living things and to apply our research results to the development of new, safer, more effective compounds and technologies that will allow us to improve health, agriculture and environment.
We research to improve life.
Welcome
The National Centre for Biotechnolgy (CNB) is a research centre that forms part of the Spanish National Research Council (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, CSIC), Spain’s most important public scientific institution. The CNB opened in 1992 to lead the development of modern biotechnology in Spain.
Our scientific goal is framed in the World Health Organization (WHO) One Health initiative, which we view as crucial at a time when global challenges transcend local and compartmentalized research, demanding for intensive collaborative efforts that exploit cutting-edge technologies. Our focus embraces four major scientific and societal challenges: infectious diseases, inflammation and cancer, sustainability of safe food production and bioremediation of environmentally relevant emissions. These challenging goals are viable in a singular centre as the CNB, which houses a broad diversity of scientists (biologists, biochemists, physicists and computational scientists) and a unique array of stateóf-the-art infrastructures that cover multiple cutting-edge quantitative technologies. This environment paves the way for successfully addressing biological problems from an integrative perspective.
The CNB is distinguished by its versatile interdisciplinary research that combines molecular biology methods with the latest technology in the fields of functional and structural biology. We are a team of more than 600 professionals committed to research excellence. Four keywords summarize our strategy to reach institutional and scientific goals: TRAINING, LEADERSHIP, COLLABORATION and TRANSFER.
We hope these lines will awaken the reader’s interest in our work and our results. Here you will find up-to-date information on our centre’s organisation and mission, our research lines, our recent contributions to science and innovation, forthcoming scientific events and outreach activities, as well as training opportunities, job offers, and other useful data.
Welcome to the CNB!
Mario Mellado
Director