At present, the Director of the Institute is Prof. Silvano Riva, who succeeded to A. Falaschi when he became in 1987 the head of the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology in Trieste. Overall, more than thirty distinct research projects are currently active. The continued scientific collaboration with the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology was recently formalized by the creation of a separate Section of the Institute in Trieste. Due to its considerable size and traditions, the Institute plays an important role at the national level in promoting new lines of research in basic genetics and molecular biology and in the most recent biotechnological applications. In the past ten years the Institute has also established active collaborations with several companies for the development of new biotechnology products.
Considerable effort is put in the training of young researchers.
Although, like all CNR research structures, the Institute has no institutional teaching duties, it is nevertheless involved directly in scientific training in genetics and molecular biology at the undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral levels, thanks to its close interactions with the Department of Genetics and Microbiology of the University of Pavia , and graduate courses are frequently taught by its scientists. The Institute is regularly host to a number of foreign scientists, in the framework of collaborative research and of international training programmes.