GINYS-IRSICAIXA-003

Living Lab Health

The Living Lab for Health aims to tackle complex and persistent health challenges by fostering multistakeholder innovation networks. Its core mission is to drive system innovation for increased collective impact. The Lab focuses on issues demanding mutual learning and knowledge integration to design and implement comprehensive, high-leverage interventions. It considers crucial leverage factors across various systemic areas, including social, technological, research and innovation, environmental, economic, political, and institutional aspects. The Living Lab facilitates innovation networks to collaboratively design and implement these interventions, emphasizing mutually reinforcing, decentralized, and collaborative approaches. It adheres to robust methodological frameworks designed to amplify the impact of research and innovation, and it conducts its own research to refine its methods and disseminate its findings. Two primary categories of complex health challenges are addressed: Health protection and promotion, such as healthy and sustainable diets, affective sexual health, mental health, and COVID-19 prevention. Prevention, diagnostic, and therapeutic challenges, especially those that are comorbid or require diverse factor consideration, like Long COVID. Operating as a think tank, the Lab provides a space for strategic reflection, learning, exploration, and the co-creation of transdisciplinary knowledge and interventions, involving a wide range of actors. A key initiative is the co-coordination of the Barcelona CaixaResearch Living Lab, alongside the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal). This initiative, launched by Barcelona City Council and "la Caixa" Foundation, focuses on promoting systemic health innovation in Barcelona, including collaborations with IrsiCaixa and Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol. The Lab targets a diverse array of stakeholders, varying by the specific health challenge (scientific-technical vs. socio-technical).

GINYS-IRSICAIXA-002

Human samples processing laboratory

The Sample Processing and Storage Service, in operation since 1993, supports scientific research in the biomedical field by processing and storing samples for use in both basic and clinical research. The team has over 15 years experience in the isolation and storage of PBMCs, plasma, serum, urine, faeces, semen, vaginal fluid, biopsy material, etc. Some 350 samples are processed monthly. The service has its own SOPs but adapts to the sample processing and storage protocols of sponsors for multicentre studies and to particular quality control and variable recording requirements

GINYS-IRSICAIXA-001

New generation sequencing for HIV genotyping

Tests include genotypic antiretroviral resistance determination in reverse transcriptase, protease and integrase as well as genotypic HIV tropism testing. Resistance is usually determined from plasma, but can also be determined from PBMCs or low-viral- load plasma (ultracentrifugation) for patient with low viral loads or with non-evaluable results. The service, launched in 1999, was designated a reference centre for antiretroviral resistance testing by the Catalan Health Service in 2002. It also participates in research projects and clinical trials with other institutions and pharmaceutical companies