The Italian Forum on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioeconomy, or IFIB, is an interactive forum of two days of pre-arranged face-to-face bilateral meetings (B2B) between Startups, Companies, Universities, public and private Research Centres in the field of industrial biotechnology and bioeconomy. IFIB 2020 ENTERPRISE EUROPE NETWORK PARTNERING EVENT (FIGURE 6) was organized by InnovhubSSI and was held both online and in presence.
373 participants came from Europe and beyond to find potential partners for collaborations, business development, licensing agreements, joint ventures, research projects, exchange of experiences and partnership opportunities.
172 meetings were held about different main topics such as funding and investments, bioeconomy and circular economy, energy and environment, bio-based industries, agro-food, marine biotechnology, and white biotechnology.
CONTRIBUTION: In the IFIB 2020 context, our group presented the project “Lipases and cardoon: a green way to obtain bioplasticizers”, that was selected for a poster presentation (FIGURE 1). This project is part of the CARDIGAN project about valorisation of Cynara cardunculus, or cardoon, that focuses on the use of renewable raw materials to produce biopolymers, plasticizers, and bioactive molecules. In particular, our work concerns the synthesis of new green plasticizers exploiting the transformation of cardoon seed oil and fatty acids catalysed by immobilized lipases. These enzymes are immobilized on a renewable carrier materials, namely on rice husk, therefore the whole process is based on renewable raw materials.
Presenting our poster, we had the opportunity to discuss with other researchers about our results and strategy to produce biolubricants from renewable raw materials exploiting an eco-friendly reaction. The participation to the IFIB 2020 forum gave us a new point of view about our project in the context of circular bioeconomy.