Mission & Aims

Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) participates in this project through the Systems Pharmacology group leaded by Jordi Mestres, belonging to the   Research Programme on Biomedical Informatics (GRIB). That is a joint research programme of the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and the Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) located at the Barcelona Biomedical Research Park in Barcelona (Spain).

The main roles of IMIM include managing and monitoring research projects and grant requests, promoting quality research, ensuring the observance of ethical principles of professional practice, disseminating the results of research activities, and encouraging specialized teaching and continuous training by and for professionals in the field of Health Sciences. IMIM is responsible for managing the Institute’s resources, and plays an especially relevant role in managing European projects, services abroad and grants for research projects and cooperative research networks.

The Research Group on Systems Pharmacology performs research at the interface between chemistry, biology, and informatics aiming at providing a fundamental mechanistic understanding of drug efficiency and safety. To this aim, the group currently focuses its research in three lines: i) collection, storage, management, and analysis of pharmacology and safety data; ii) development of novel integrative computational approaches for predicting the pharmacology and safety of small molecules; and iii) application of these methods in drug discovery and chemical biology projects. At present, it is composed of 8 researchers (1 Head, 2 Post-doctoral researchers, 3

PhD students, and 2 Master students) integrated within the Research Program on Biomedical Informatics composed of over 60 researchers.

The Head of the group, Dr. Jordi Mestres, has over 20 years of experience in the design and development of novel computational methods for drug discovery. In the last 10 years, all this experience and expertise has been translated in what can be currently considered a state-of-the-art software for predicting the target and safety profiles of small molecules. In this respect, the group has participated in previous projects highly relevant to this project, namely, EU-ADR, ARITMO, and eTOX. The software has been adopted internally by companies such as Sanofi and GSK, among others, that use it for anticipating safety issues linked to early series of bioactive molecules.

For all this, this group fits very nicely in the present project with key contributions in three main aspects:

  1. collection of pharmacological data;
  2. design of a secure data storage and exchange environment, and
  3. identification of SCA chemomarkers for personalized medicine.

Website

http://syspharm.imim.cat/

Relevant Publications