The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Consolidator Grant to ICREA researcher Xavier Salvatella, head of the Molecular Biophysics Lab at the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), located at the PCB. Including this new grant, scientists at IRB Barcelona now hold nine ERC projects of excellence, two of these covered by Consolidator Grants.

Xavier Salvatella will receive 1,950,000 euros of funding from the ERC until 2020 to study a fundamental feature of protein biology. The objective of the “Concert” project is to unravel the connections between distant points of a protein that ensure that motions in a certain site determine those in a distant part of the same molecule. “This is what we refer to as concerted conformational motions; they can be equated with the choreography of dancers—understood as atoms—, in which if the first one raises an arm, the last one in the chain will also do the same,” explains Salvatella.

Disclosure of these “internal highways” through which information is transmitted could transform the field of drug discovery, as it would imply the identification of many other valid sites in proteins towards which to direct drugs. The project could have particular biomedical implications for the identification of new treatments for prostate cancer, as the studies will be performed with the androgen receptor—the protein targeted by the drug currently used to treat this disease.

The ERC set up the Consolidator Grants to support young researchers with a promising scientific career and to ensure new generations of scientific leaders. According to the announcement made by this organisation today, it has awarded funding to 372 of the 2.528 applicant projects in this call (15% of success).