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"
11/07/2018 - Press release
Researchers led by Emre Guney of the research programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB), a joint programme of Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM), have developed a new computational method to reuse drugs that target biological pathways common to more than one disease. A significant percentage of marketed drugs are not effective in patients due to the complexity of the biological processes involved in diseases and genetic differences between people. Despite recent technological advances, the discovery of new effective treatments takes a long time and continues to be expensive. For this reason, the reuse of medicines, i.e., the use of existing drugs for other diseases, is a very interesting alternative to reduce the costs of drug development.
Més informació "A new computational method for exploring the reuse of drugs"
06/03/2018 - Press release
The Evolutionary Genomics research group at the IMIM, led by Mar Albà, has just published an article in the journal Molecular Ecology providing the results of a study that has identified which genes participate (change their expression) in the hibernation state of hairy-eared dwarf lemurs, which belong to the only group of primates that has the ability to hibernate. These small mammals store fats in their tails, allowing them to survive the months of shortage, and which they use as fuel during hibernation. Hibernation is a response to the lack of resources we normally associate with winter, but which can occur in other conditions of scarcity, such as in desert areas or, for example, during the dry season in Madagascar. “The genes involved in hibernation are present in almost all mammals, including humans. It is a question of when and how they are expressed that makes the phenomenon of hibernation possible. As they are primates, lemur genes are relatively similar to those in humans, so it is even more interesting to study this species”, explains José Luis Villanueva-Cañas, a researcher from the IMIM's Evolutionary Genomics group.
Més informació "First genetic study of primate hibernation in their natural environment"
04/12/2017 - Press release
What distinguishes Homo sapiens from other living beings? And the group of mammals? What makes them different? These are the questions that researchers from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) have been trying to answer, together with the Department of Experimental and Health Sciences at the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). To do this, they analysed the already-sequenced genomes of 68 mammals and identified 6,000 families of genes that are only found in these animals. These are genes with no homologues outside mammals, in other words, they are not present in other hairless species. In humans, it is estimated that they represent 2.5% of the genes that code for proteins. The work was led by Dr. José Luis Villanueva-Cañas, a member of the IMIM's Evolutionary Genomics research group, and currently a researcher at the Evolutionary Biology Institute (UPF-CSIC), and Dr. Mar Albà, an ICREA researcher at both the IMIM and the Biomedical Informatics Research Programme (GRIB). The study also involved Dr. David Andreu's group from the UPF's Department of Experimental and Health Sciences. It has been published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
Més informació "Genes identified that distinguish mammals from other animals"
13/09/2017 - Press release
The five-year project, Enhancing Translational Safety Assessment through Integrative Knowledge Management (eTRANSAFE), aims to develop an advanced data integration infrastructure together with innovative computational methods to improve the security in drug development process and is funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking (IMI 2) together with the pharmaceutical industry. The eTRANSAFE consortium is a private and public partnership of 8 academic institutions, 6 SMEs and 12 pharmaceutical companies, and is coordinated by the Institut Hospital del Mar d'Investigacions Mèdiques (IMIM) and led by the pharmaceutical company Novartis and Bayer AG. The eTRANSAFE project aims at improving the safety assessment across the drug discovery and development process by applying bioinformatics approaches to shared preclinical and clinical data to systematically analyse the translatability of effects. Thus, enabling the optimisation of resources and the development of safer medicines.
23/02/2017 - Press release
A study led by researchers at the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and the Institute of Medical Physics and Biophysics at the Faculty of Medicine in Charité Hospital, Berlin, published in the journal Nature Communications, demonstrates that the cholesterol present in cell membranes can interfere with the function of an important brain membrane protein, through a previously unknown mode of interaction. Specifically, cholesterol is capable of regulating the activity of the adenosine receptor, by invading it and accessing the active site. This will allow new ways of interacting with these proteins to be devised that in the future could lead to drugs for treating diseases like Alzheimer's. The adenosine receptor belongs to the GPCR family (G Protein-Coupled Receptors), a large group of proteins located in cell membranes, which are key in the transmission of signals and communication between cells. GPCRs are therefore involved in the majority of important physiological processes, including the interpretation of sensory stimuli such as vision, smell, and taste, the regulation of the immune and inflammatory system, and behaviour modulation.
Més informació "New role of cholesterol in regulating brain proteins discovered"
02/08/2016 - Press release
A study including the IMIM (Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute), the Duke Lemur Center, and Duke University has, for the first time, been looking at gene regulation in hibernating primates. They studied the fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius). This is a very little-studied species and exceptional as it is the only primate capable of hibernating, subsisting on the lipids it has stored in its tail over the rest of the year. The project is also one of the few works on hibernation that uses a modern technique known as RNAseq which provides a global view of which genes are expressed and quantifies these. This is the first genomic data on this species.
Més informació "Gene regulation in a hibernating primate studied for the first time"
29/07/2016 - Press release
The prestigious journal PLoS Pathogens has just published an article on the results of the Malaria Box project, an initiative of the Medicines for Malaria Venture that has given free, open access to new families of antimalarial molecules to 200 laboratories from 30 countries. The purpose of the project is to encourage new pharmacological discoveries that make it possible to fight neglected diseases and other illnesses and, for the moment, it has already initiated more than a dozen projects aimed at developing new drugs for various diseases. The Systems Pharmacology research group at the IMIM was the only Catalan participant in this extensive study that also involved three other Spanish centres, in the Basque country (BIOBIDE), Galicia (University of Santiago de Compostela) and Madrid (GlaxoSmithKline R&D).
Més informació "The IMIM takes part in the first major open source drug discovery trial"
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