29/06/2020 - General information
This month Sifted, the technology magazine of the Financial Times, has contacted various experts in the technology industry and in analyzing data on investments, has concluded that the Spanish entrepreneurial ecosystem has high quality healthtech startups, ranging from drug discovery to novel virtual reality therapies. In its latest edition, Sifted has published a list of the top healthcare start-ups in Spain, including Chemotargets, the IMIM's spin-off founded in 2006 by Dr. Jordi Mestres, coordinator of the Systems Pharmacology research group at IMIM. Chemotargets is a company that offers state-of-the-art methodologies with predictive capabilities that allow the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry to accelerate the design and optimization of drug candidates and improve cost efficiency and safety. Its CLARITY® platform covers the entire field of drug discovery and development, from the de novo design of molecules for new targets to pharmacovigilance in the drug market stage.
25/06/2020 - General information
Dr. Ferran Sanz, Dra. Laura Furlong and Dr. Baldo Oliva of the IMIM Biomedical Informatics Research Program, participate in the Disc4All project: Training network to advance integrated computational simulations in translational medicine, applied to intervertebral disc degeneration, coordinated by Jérôme Noailly, principal investigator in the Biomechanics and Mechanobiology research area at BCN MedTech of UPF. It is one of the ten selected projects in Catalonia as an Innovative Training Network (ITN) Marie Sklodowska-Curie, in the European Commission's ITN MSC Actions call. The European innovative training networks (ITN) aim to train a new generation of researchers in their early stages who are creative, enterprising and innovative, capable of dealing with the challenges of the future and turn knowledge and ideas into products and services with an economic and a social benefit.
25/05/2020 - Press release
The company Chemotargets -based in the Barcelona Science Park and a global leader in the development of computational platforms for the design, optimization and safety evaluation of drugs- has signed a strategic agreement with the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) in order to accelerate research projects for the discovery and development of new oncological therapies that respond to important unmet medical needs. This public-private partnership will establish a framework for collaboration that promotes the creation of synergies between the IMIM experience in the identification of new therapeutic targets in emerging fields of cancer biology and the Chemotargets expertise in drug discovery and development. This initiative will include the use of cutting-edge computational technologies developed specifically to rapidly design drug candidates acting on new mechanisms of action or directed to targets that are difficult to address and for which no identified drugs currently exist.
18/05/2020 - Covid-19
The GRIB Integrative Biomedical Informatics group (IMIM-UPF) has launched a new version of DisGeNET (version 7.0, May 8, 2020), which contains more than 1 million associations between 21,000 genes and 30,000 diseases, and 350,000 associations involving more than 190,000 genomic variants. All the data sources have been updated including the information automatically extracted by text mining of the literature. In addition, a new resource focused on COVID-19 has also been created. DisGeNET is a public knowledge management platform that offers information on genes and genomic variants associated with human diseases, which is obtained by integrating data from more than a dozen public resources and the scientific literature. DisGeNET contains one of the most comprehensive collections of genes and variants associated with human diseases that is currently available and is a resource for sharing and exchanging information recommended by the ELIXIR project, which is called, ELIXIR Recommended Interoperability Resource.
06/05/2020 - Press release
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) has licensed the Chemotargets CLARITY® platform for predicting unknown secondary targets for new molecules of pharmaceutical interest. This contract is meant to directly address the FDA's requirement for a computational method which can predict potential molecular targets from chemical structure and provide a user-friendly environment for analysis of results. Molecular targets identified with high confidence by CLARITY® may be evaluated by FDA/CDER for their association with adverse events, addiction liability, or their association with disease within the specified indication(s).
Més informació "The FDA licenses Chemotargets CLARITY platform"
17/04/2020 - Press release
Chemotargets, a global leader in predictive analytics solutions for the pharma and biotech sector, begins a phase of transformation to become a biotechnology company that will develop new medicines in multiple therapeutic areas, with an initial focus on oncology. Founded in 2006 as a spin-off from Dr. Jordi Mestres' Systems Pharmacology lab under the auspices of the IMIM Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute, a leading academic centre of excellence based in Barcelona, Chemotargets is opening an investment round to undertake the transformation of its business model. Genesis Biomed, a well-established consultancy firm in the health and biotech sectors, and CREA Inversión, an M&A boutique advisory firm specialised in corporate transactions and financing, will advise Chemotargets in this transformation.
Més informació "Chemotargets opens an investment round to enter a new phase of growth"
06/02/2020 - Press release
Ten years ago, researchers at Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) created a computer platform for collecting highly relevant scientific information that had, until then, been scattered across several sources: relationships between genes and diseases. This open access tool called DisGeNET has become a benchmark in the field of research. From now on, it will also have an industrial application thanks to MedBioinformatics Solutions, a spin-off of IMIM and UPF that is to develop software and consulting services that will bring added value to the information of DisGeNET to help companies develop new products and services. The company came to life today, 6 February, with the signing of the deeds of incorporation by the acting director of IMIM, Jorge Martínez, the UPF general manager, Jaume Badia; the researchers and partners of the company, Ferran Sanz, Laura Furlong, Janet Piñero and Olga Valverde, and the investor partners: Frederic Abelló and the companies Prous Institute for Biomedical Research and Icrowd+D.
27/11/2019 - Press release
Outstanding women researchers who use the latest computer advances for biomedical research and directives from companies and institutions in the world of technology and biomedicine will present the latest developments in this field of research and discuss the most immediate challenges at the end of November in Barcelona. The meeting will take place during the first edition of the Advances in Computational Biology (AdvCompBio) conference, which will gather around 200 attendees in the auditorium of La Pedrera in Barcelona on November 28 and 29. In this conference, all speakers and organizers are women, although the sessions will be open to everyone. AdvCompBio is primarily a high-level international scientific meeting, intended to discuss the latest artificial intelligence and big data technologies in computational biology, promote the exchange of experiences and create collaborative networks.
08/10/2019 - Press release
Based on a study of 566 drugs that interact with 129 different proteins, researchers from the Systems Pharmacology research group, part of the GRIB Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics, a joint programme between the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), in collaboration with researchers from the University of New Mexico, in the United States, realised that 71% of drugs have stronger affinities for their target proteins than those of the small internal molecules responsible for regulating their functions. Surprisingly, this is the first time that the affinities of endogenous ligands and drugs for the same proteins have been quantified. Humans have thousands of proteins, each with a specific function that is often regulated by thousands of small molecules synthesised by our bodies. This set of small molecules, also known as "endogenous metabolites", is known as the "human metabolome". Each one interacts with its native protein with a certain affinity that has been carefully optimised, in a natural way, throughout the long process of evolution, and this can vary between species and even in some instances, more subtly, between individuals.
Més informació "Our own bodies hold the key to designing safer drugs"
13/05/2019 - Events
BSC, UPC and IMIM organize the first Advances in Computational Biology conference will bring together researchers working on systems biology, omics technologies, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) with applications to biology from both the public and the private sectors. The conference will be held November 28-29 in La Pedrera (Barcelona). Maria Jose Rementeria, Social Link Analytics group leader at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and one of the organizers, states: "One of the main purposes of the conference is to visualize and promote the research done by women scientists and for this reason all presenters will be women, although the conference is open to everyone. We want to create a space to foster collaborations between scientists, providing a unique opportunity to share ideas and build research networks".
Més informació "A conference to promote women's research in computational biology"
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