Celebration of the BiSC Scientific Meeting 2022

The 2022 BiSC scientific meeting was held on Friday, March 11, a meeting of the entire team and collaborators of the Barcelona Life Study Cohort (BiSC).

Two years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the BiSC team has met again in person. The aim of the day was to bring together the whole team, share the status of the project, its evolution, and encourage the scientific debate on the studies led by the different researchers.

The meeting began with a presentation by the project’s principal investigator, Professor Jordi Sunyer, who recalled the large number of people who have worked to make BiSC possible and the value behind the data collected.

Then, Dr. Mireia Gascón updated us on the status of the project, which has already finished recruiting and has started the 24-month visit. He also reviewed the many associated studies and what the future holds for keeping the cohort alive.

In the next block, we presented the measure of exposure of mothers and children to air pollution and other ongoing studies on maternal mental health, maternal mental health, and neurodevelopment during the pandemic and chemical exposure analysis. This section also summarized the different biological samples collected at BiSC and presented everything that will be obtained from the placentas of BiSC volunteers.

In the last block, doctoral students were able to present their doctoral project plans within BiSC, as well as the initial analyzes.
Finally, the day provided space for discussion between sessions and also to start preparations for a meeting with the participating families of BiSC, without which the project would not be possible.

In conclusion, although we are still organizing data and continuing in parallel with postnatal recruitment, the day allowed us to advance in the face of scientific analysis and showed us the richness of BiSC to better understand how the environment can affect the health maternal and child.