Intelligent Pharma i la Divisió de Biomedicina del Centre Tecnològic Leitat (Biomed Division), both located at the Barcelona Science Park, have reached a collaboration agreement, the objective of which is to expedite the research process of new drugs with anticancer action and to improve current cancer therapies and the quality of life of patients who suffer from this disease.

PTo this end, Intelligent Pharma –a spin-off company specialising in the design and development of “ad hoc scientific software” for its clients in the field of biopharmaceutical research–, will provide Leitat Tech with their technology and computational screening systems to identify in a fast and reliable manner new compounds with antitumor biological activity potential, which Leitat will subsequently confirm through in vitro and in vivo studies.

“In one or two week’s time and using a database that contains hundreds of thousands of compounds we can obtain 50 new molecules of interest, which allows us to cut down on the costs and reduce the development time of new drugs”, explained Ignasi Belda, director of Intelligent Pharma.

Biomed Division focuses part of its current activity on the research of new therapeutic targets to arrest tumour angiogenesis, a process that makes the tumour grow and disseminate, and that is present in all types of cancer. “For this reason, the new compounds we aim to develop could either be used to prevent the growth of breast or colorectal cancer or the growth of, for instance, melanoma, which might appear to be less aggressive at first but hard to prevent from extending once it has spread beyond the dermis”, explained Francesc Mitjans, director of the said Division.

Intelligent Pharma has also developed a parallel research line to computation the objective of which is to supply natural products already known in the field of traditional medicine to its clients in order to obtain new molecules of therapeutic interest on the basis of their extracts. Within the collaboration framework with Leitat, Intelligent Pharma will provide information on plants that are endemic to some areas of Catalonia and that have traditionally been used to treat disorders, such as intestinal disorders, associated with tumours processes. Using this information as the start point, Leitat will focus on the identification and isolation of the active principle responsible for the therapeutic action in order to develop molecules that may be used as drugs.

Specifically, ethnobotanics experts at Intelligent Pharma are now working on two areas of the Mediterranean Arch which, due to their peculiar geographical and climate characteristics, favour the development of vegetal species that are not found anywhere else. An example of these species that are reported in the medical literature is taxol and its derivatives (Taxus brevifolia).