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Researches from PCB, IRB Barcelona and Intelligent Pharma to collaborate in two TRACE projects

By 31 de March de 2010No Comments
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 31.03.2010

Researches from PCB, IRB Barcelona and Intelligent Pharma to collaborate in two TRACE projects

Researchers from the Institute of Research in Biomedicine (IRB) -based at the Barcelona Science Park (PCB)– and the Catalan biotech companies Intelligent Pharma –also located at PCB– and Lead Molecular Design, will join forces in two research projects to optimize the procurement of new drugs. Both these projects are endorsed by the Ministry of Science and Innovation through its Transmission of Knowledge to Enterprise programme (TRACE). Moreover, one of the projects will be coordinated by Jordi Quintana, head of PCB´s Drug Discovery platform.

The two projects are independent from each other. To be specific, Intelligent Pharma and the Design and Synthesis of Peptides group from IRB Barcelona, headed by Ernest Giralt, will collaborate for a two year period in the first project entitled “Application of methods based on artificial intelligence to chemical medicine: experimental validation of the Helios programme”, developed by Intelligent Pharma. The objective of this project is to test the efficacy of Helios 2.0 technology in searching for molecules of therapeutic interest in the areas of AIDS, hypercholesterolemia and multiresistant bacterial infections. The alliance has come about in response to a need to validate the efficacy of the molecules in a traditional laboratory setting.

The second project, entitled “Design of compounds of therapeutic interest by means of computational and structural technologies”, to be coordinated by Jordi Quintana, is intended to develop and validate a software to increase the payoff of an innovative strategy called fragment screening, which consists in identifying new molecules that interact with proteins of interest. The fragments are then combined with other molecules in order to obtain new compounds with therapeutic action. This project, which is also two years in duration, will be undertaken by Miquel Pons, a specialist in biomolecular nuclear magnetic resonance, and his research team, with the collaboration of Lead Molecular Design and the Instituto Químico de Sarriá.

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