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.
09/05/2019 - General information
The GRIB Integrative Biomedical Informatics group (IMIM-UPF) has launched a new version of DisGeNET, a public knowledge management platform on the genomics of disease, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year. DisGeNET offers information on genes and genomic variants associated with human diseases, which is obtained by integrating 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. The new version of DisGeNET (6.0) contains approximately 600,000 associations between more than 17,000 genes and 24,000 human diseases, focusing particularly on genetic alterations associated with disease: this version includes more than 117,000 genomic variants associated with 10,000 diseases. In addition, the phenotypic landscape covered by DisGeNET has been expanded to include the genomic basis of clinical manifestations of diseases, both signs and symptoms, as well as laboratory tests results.
Més informació "New version of DisGeNET 6.0 and ELIXIR recognition"
10/04/2019 - General information
The project EOSC-Life aims to create an open collaborative digital space for life science in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). EOSC-Life brings together the 13 european research infrastructures in the Health and Food domain of the ESFRI Roadmap and is funded by H2020 for the period 2019-2023. The project involves research groups from 46 European academic institutions. These include the GRIB Systems Pharmacology research group (IMIM-UPF) led by Jordi Mestres, which is helping develop collaborative tools for integrating and analysing all kinds of data in the field of life sciences.
07/06/2018 - General information
Sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) continues to be a major public health challenge, accounting for about 20% of all natural deaths in industrialised countries. Although there has been a substantial decline in overall coronary heart disease mortality rates in the past 30 years, SCA rates have fallen to a lesser extent. Some 50 % of all cardiovascular deaths are caused by SCA, a condition in which the heart suddenly and unexpectedly stops beating. With survival rates ranging between 5 % and 20 %, there's a need to improve SCA prevention and treatment. To address this issue, a European public-private consortium is now working on the creation of a joint, harmonised database by analysing SCA victims and DNA samples, along with detailed clinical and medication use information. unded by H2020 Programme of the European Union, the team of scientists contributing to the ESCAPE-NET project, including the System Pharmacology group of GRIB (IMIM-UPF) led by Jordi Mestres, summarised the objectives of their research in the 'European Heart Journal'.
15-01-2018 - General information
The Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (FDA/CDER) and Chemotargets will work together under a 5-year Research Collaboration Agreement (RCA). The primary objective of the research agreement will be to assess the utility and performance of the Chemotargets CLARITY® intelligence & discovery platform to predict on-target and off-target activities using known pharmacology and safety data from experimental studies of small molecular entities. Evaluating in silico models for broad pharmacological profiling is of interest to CDER to predict potential adverse events of drugs in development. Additionally, insight into a chemical’s molecular target profile can help predict abuse and addiction potential, which may reduce risks associated with exposure to these substances.
09/05/2017 - General information
A study led by Jana Selent, head of the GPCR drug discovery group of GRIB (IMIM-UPF) and Martha Sommer (Institute of Medical Physics and Biophysics at the Faculty of Medicine in Charité Hospital, Berlin) published in the journal Nature Communications, focused on how G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and arrestin form complexes. The human GPCR family is an important class of targets for nearly half of all medicines prescribed today with the majority being involved in sensory and neuronal processes. Complex formation with intracellular signaling proteins such as arrestin is critical for many bodily processes. In this context, the published study identifies a previously unknown binding element critical to GPCR-arrestin interaction. Using a combination of computer simulations and site-directed fluorescence spectroscopy, the researchers were able to show that loops within the C-edge of arrestin are anchored to the membrane while forming pre- and high affinity complexes with GPCRs.
Més informació "How proteins find each other to form signaling complexes"
13/2/2017 - General information
Predictive models of diseases are gaining importance in medicine thanks to their usefulness when customizing treatments. Hence, computational methods based on human biology have become a key factor for the development of customized medicine. This scenario has led to the birth of CompBioMed project, a centre of excellence in biomedical computing that promotes the uptake and exploitation of high performance computing (HPC) in the field of biomedicine. Basic, clinical and industrial researchers will be able to participate as users in the new project, which, for the moment, will work in three different areas: cardiovascular, molecular and neuromusculoskeletal. University College of London is leading the initiative, which promotes interdisciplinary business opportunities by getting its industrial partners to participate, as well as support and facilitate modelling and simulation activities and provide education to a diverse set of communities.
Més informació "CompBioMed, a centre of excellence in computational biomedicine, is born"
24/01/2017 - General information
A new European research project has been launched, TransQST (Translational Quantitative Systems Toxicology) funded with 16 million euros, aimed at improving the understanding of adverse effects to drugs and their safety, which will provide innovative methods and software for modelling toxicological systems. Project participants include the Integrative Biomedical Informatics research group at the IMIM (GRIB, IMIM-UPF), coordinated by Laura Furlong and Ferran Sanz. Adverse reactions to drugs are unwanted side effects and involve significant cost in terms of patient morbidity, mortality and hospitalisation. TransQST will last five years, and its goal is to develop new computational methods using the best data available from both the public and private spheres to address the problems of safe drug development. It is being funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertakint (IMI 2), a public-private European initiative that aims to accelerate the development of more effective and safer drugs for patients.
Més informació "Sixteen million euros injected into research on adverse drug reactions"
17/01/2017 - General information
The kick-off meeting of the project ESCAPE-NET (European Sudden Cardiac Arrest network: towards Prevention, Education and New Treatment) will be held from 17-19 January, in Amsterdam. This project falls under the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme, in the area of personalised medicine and within the sudden cardiac arrest field. The project is being coordinated by the Academisch Medisch Centrum at the University of Amsterdam and involves a total of 16 scientific teams from all over Europe. These include the Systems Pharmacology Research group from the Biomedical Informatics programme at the IMIM and UPF, coordinated byDr Jordi Mestres. This group will contribute its experience and expertise in the field of predicting the mechanism of action and safety of drugs and will help develop a personalised risk score for sudden cardiac arrest based on the individual analysis of chemical and biological markers associated with cardiac arrhythmia. Sudden cardiac arrest is responsible for 20% of deaths in Europe; currently survival rates are only between 5 and 20%, so there is a pressing need to improve both prevention and treatment. So far, efforts towards this have been hampered by a lack of large patient cohorts with detailed information on the disease.
15/07/2016 - General information
Recently, Dr. Jordi Mestres, coordinator of the Systems Pharmacology research group at the IMIM was elected to the Scientific Advisory Board of the Chemical Probes portal, a free internet-based tool that allows researchers to look for the most appropriate chemical probe for their project, before they start their research.Chemical probes are very small molecules that interact with multiple proteins and they have had a huge impact in biomedical research as, if they are low quality, they can generate erroneous results. Understanding the interactions of these small molecules is key in the development of safer, more efficient drugs.
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