18/05/2015 - Press release
Under Horizon 2020, the EU has funded the 3.5 million project MedBioinformatics. This project aims to develop useful bioinformatics tools and applications, and autonomously usable for analysing the huge amount of data and knowledge generated in healthcare and biomedical research in order to facilitate translational research and precision medicine.The Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute of Barcelona (IMIM) coordinates the EU-funded MedBioinformatics research project. According to Prof. Ferran Sanz, director of the IMIM-UPF Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) and coordinator of this project, "most potential users, i.e. translational researchers and health professionals, do not have adequate tools to efficiently exploit this large and heterogeneous amount of information. So far, efforts to develop bioinformatics methods and tools have not produced the expected impact in healthcare environments"
13/05/2015 - Press release
Researchers from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) have discovered the key role of an enzyme in the differentiation ability of embryonic stem cells. According to the study published in the journal Molecular Cell, enzyme LOXL2 would be involved in maintaining the balance between the pluripotency and the differentiation in this type of cells that can turn into any cell in the body. The study was coordinated by the researcher from the Cancer Research Programme Sandra Peiró, and explores in greater depth the knowledge on the specialization mechanism of embryonic stem cells, opening the door to a better manipulation. Researchers from the Experimental and Health Sciences Department at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra also participated in the study.
Més informació "Key role of enzyme in the pluripotency of embryonic stem cells discovered"
28/04/2015 - Press release
Chemotargets, a spin-off company of IMIM, has launched CTlink[GUI] - a commercial version of the CTlink software that offers users intuitive, interactive graphical tools enabling them to more easily analyse results obtained using this software. CTlink can be installed on any Linux, Windows or Mac computer, desktop or laptop, and can predict how a small molecule will interact with thousands of different proteins. It is designed as a computational framework for linking different systemic entities - that is, for linking molecules, proteins, pathways, side effects, organs and diseases. It is a very important tool used by biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.
Més informació "Chemotargets launches easier-to-use, more intuitive graphical interface CTlink[GUI]"
21/04/2015 - Press release
Researchers at the Institut Hospital del Mar d’Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM) have identified a new way of treating colorectal cancer. In the study published in the journal Science Signaling, the team led by LLuís Espinosa, investigator of IMIM's research group into stem cells and cancer, have shown that inhibition of endosomal activity is a potential therapeutic strategy for the treatment of cancers with the BRAF mutated gene. This discovery is an important step in the personalisation of the treatment of colorectal cancer, as the presence of this mutation is associated with an increased resistance compared to standard therapies. Researchers from IDIBELL - the Catalan Institute of Oncology - and the Hospital de Bellvitge also participated.
19/02/2015 - Press release
Researchers at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) have applied a new computational methodology to anticipate the degree of selectivity of the molecules that are used to study protein functions and reduce the risk of establishing erroneous relations between proteins and diseases. The proteins under study could be future candidates for new therapeutic targets. The study is published in the prestigious journal ACS Chemical Biology and was selected for the cover. Molecules are essential tools for exploring protein functions, as they have the capacity to activate, inhibit and modulate their function. For many years, in order to explore protein functions, namely to know their biological role, small molecules known as 'chemical probes' have been used, which interact with the protein under study, to become a possible candidate as a new therapeutic target. However, in order for them to be truly useful, these molecules must selectively interact with the protein under study. ‘Until now, it was assumed that these chemical probes only and exclusively interacted with the protein that was being studied, so that any variations in the results of experiments were interpreted as the consequence of the selective interaction of the chemical probe with the protein under study’ comments Jordi Mestres, coordinator of the Research Group in Systems Pharmacology at the Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB per its Spanish acronym) at IMIM and the UPF.
Més informació "The promiscuity of chemical probes discovered"
2/12/2014 - Press release
With the goal of promoting the safety of patients and the quality of healthcare in Europe, the European Commission, sponsored by the Italian Presidency, has organised a meeting in Rome on 2nd and 3rd December with the participation of healthcare experts, researchers, politicians and international journalists, to discuss, from different perspectives, how to promote the quality of medical healthcare through healthcare systems and how to improve security in hospitals. IMIM’s project is the only one selected from Spain. The meeting will focus on communicating the results of some projects funded through the EU Healthcare Programme and the impact on the daily lives of Europeans. From all projects submitted, only 8 have been selected in several areas, one of them being the EURHOBOP Project (EURopean Hospital Benchmarking by Outcomes in acute coronary syndrome Processes), coordinated by Dr. Jaume Marrugat, a researcher from the research group on cardiovascular epidemiology and genetics at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute).
13/11/2014 - Press release
A study by the international consortium The Myocardial Infarction Genetics (MIGen) with the participation of researchers from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) has analysed the genetic characteristics in more than 110,000 people and has identified, for the first time, 15 mutations in gene NPC1L1. The existence of any of these mutations has been associated to a reduction in the levels of LDL cholesterol or “bad cholesterol” as well as protecting against the risk of having an acute myocardial infarction. The results are published on-line in the prestigious journal The New England Journal of Medicine.
17/09/2014 - Press release
Researchers in Biomedical Informatics at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) and at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) have recently published a study in eLife showing that RNA called non-coding (IncRNA) plays an important role in the evolution of new proteins, some of which could have important cell functions yet to be discovered. Ribosomes produce proteins from the instructions found in an RNA molecule. However, only 2% of the human genome is RNA containing information for the synthesis of proteins, meaning it is coding. Other parts of the genome that are transcribed could be “evolutionary noise”, parts of the DNA that are copied to RNA randomly but with no concrete biological function. Now, a new sequencing technique has revealed that many of these transcripts (IncRNAs) may also translate into proteins, leading to an intense debate.
09/09/2014 - Press release
Mental disorders and brain disease represent a high cost in Europe and around the world. Researchers from IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) have recently published in the PLOS ONE journal the results of a study that estimates that the cost of disorders of the brain in Spain is the equivalent of 84 billion Euros per year. This figure is far higher than the Spanish expenditure in health, which was 73 billion Euros in 2012. When referring to the cost of a disease, this not only includes the direct health cost – resources used for primary healthcare, specialised care, hospital stays, medication, preventive programmes, etc. –but also direct non-medical costs of these disorders and diseases –for instance, the cost of carers –and the indirect costs or potential loss of productivity for death, permanent or temporary disability, lost or decreased leisure, etc. For this study, a group of nineteen disorders and diseases of the brain were included, encompassing neurological diseases –dementia, epilepsy, headache, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, strokes and neuromuscular diseases – and also mental diseases –anxiety disorders, humour disorders and psychotic disorders – to reach a global and individual estimate of their impact.
A study carried out by researchers from the Research programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB) at IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute) and the UPF has used new human genetic data to learn more about mutations that may have conferred a selective advantage to humans over the past 5 million years of evolution. This provides researchers with a new vision on human evolution. The availability of the genetic variants in a large number of people, through initiatives such as the Project 1000 Genomes, is useful not only to understand the genetic basis of diseases, but also to carry out research on the human evolution. According to Mar Albà, an ICREA professor and the coordinator of the IMIM research group on Evolutionary Genomics “This variation provides us with a measure on the proportion of the amino acid changes seen typically in a protein while it maintains its function. Once we have this value, we can then count the differences with the ancestral protein in humans and chimpanzees and if we find there have been more changes than expected, this is because the function of the protein may have changed during human evolution”.
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