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Drug Discovery Platform to offer more services

By 13 de November de 2008November 18th, 2020No Comments
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 13.11.2008

Drug Discovery Platform to offer more services

The Drug Discovery Platform has recently moved to new premises on the ground floor of the Modular Building of the Barcelona Science Park (PCB), from where it will continue its consultancy work and will also offer computational research and technology services for analysing compound databases with the aim of facilitating and speeding up the design process for new drugs.

The mission of the PDD is to promote and add value to research carried out in the PCB, and by extension within the UB group, in areas associated with the discovery of new drugs. It applies its experience in the first stages of drug discovery (identification and validation of therapeutic targets, modular design, hit finding and lead optimization) to improve the quality of projects and, it is hoped, to achieve a reduction in the time and resources required for the process, which ranges from the initial idea to the clinical stage.

Its consulting services include carrying out competitive intelligence studies, designed to improve the strategic planning of projects, as well as drawing up action plans to optimise research results in the area of drug discovery. The specialist advice offered by this platform boosts the development of new projects between UB researchers, technology platforms and companies located within the PCB on the one hand, and external firms in the chemical, pharmaceutical, biotech, cosmetic and agro-food sectors, among others, on the other.

The Drug Discovery Platform also coordinates the iniciative, which is backed by the Barcelona Science Park, the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The aim of this initiative is to create an annotated molecular library of chemical compounds generated by academics from across Spain, which will include a register of their functions and/or possible applications on the basis of results obtained through various screening techniques, both experimental (such as HTS) and virtual and which are carried out in the USC and UPF, respectively. This chemico-biological database will be available to the scientific community and its contents will be web-accessible. In order to develop this project the Chembiobank laboratory in the PCB, located within the PDD, has a cold chamber large enough to store the desired 50,000 compounds.

In February 2009 the Chembiobank laboratory within the PCB will be installed with a liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (LC/MS) instrument for the analytic control of library compounds and a liquid handling device that will enable compounds to be distributed in solutions and on plates for use in experimental screening. The initiative aims to characterise the compounds in 1000 virtual trials and 100 experimental trials, which will be conducted in screening centres across Spain and Europe.