The Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Biology (CIRB) is a novel Collège de France / CNRS / INSERM research structure located at the Collège de France in the Center of Paris. Nine teams from different horizons have recently founded this structure with the spirit to foster new collaborations within biological domains and across the usual disciplinary divide. In the long term the nine founding groups, specialized in the fields of infectious diseases, neurosciences and cardio-vascular research, will be rejoined by a similar number of new groups, primarily junior groups, including chemists, physicists and mathematicians with a strong interest for biological sciences. The new Center will benefit from being in the vicinity of several other laboratories and from an extraordinary rich intellectual milieu, with conferences that cover all aspects of knowledge. Outside of Collège de France, CIRB has developed strong interactions with high profile neighboring institutions, in particular the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Curie Institute.