Mission statement
| The PharmacoInformatics group is devoted to the development and application of computational methodologies in the area of drug design and development.Nowadays, computational methodologies are widely applied in many steps of the drug discovery and development; from the structural modeling of a pharmacological target to the prediction of the ligand binding affinity. However, in the vast majority of cases the limitations of the current technology allow only to obtain approximate representations of the complex biological phenomena that are the subject of interests in the development of new drugs. Our group aims to improve the current state-of-the-art with a pragmatic approach. We want to develop useful tools that increase the efficiency of the pharmaceutical R&D process. At the same time, the need of producing robust models led us to overcome reductionist approaches and to develop multi-scale methods, depicting richer and more realistic representations of the phenomena under study than those produced by classical computational methods. |
Main Research Lines
In silico methods for drug safety assessmentDrug safety assessment is one of the most important bottlenecks in today’s drug development. Computational (in silico) methods offer a very interesting alternative to other experimental methods; they are faster, cheaper and require no amount of valuable compounds to obtain predictions that often have comparable quality with those obtained using in vitro or even in vivo methods. |
Molecular Interaction Fields in drug designMolecular Interaction Fields (MIF) have many applications in drug design; from the characterization of the receptor binding site, to the comparative analysis of ligand series, including their use as highly relevant molecular descriptors. |
Novel MIF-based molecular descriptorsAn important line of research is devoted to the development of MIF-based molecular descriptors (MD). In particular, we are developing a new generation of GRid INdependent Descriptors (GRIND) and implementing them in the software Pentacle. |
Molecular modeling of GPCRG-protein coupled receptors (GPCR) are the target of most drugs in the market. However, since they are membrane proteins, only a handful of X-ray crystallography structure has been reported and the homology modeling on these proteins is still challenging. |
Our group is always open to establish fruitful collaborations with academic and private institutions. Do not hesitate to contact us if you are interested in our research.
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